Sea Of Terror

Chapter 23

"Who do you work for?" Jerry Esterhausen asked. "SAS? The American Delta Force? I know! The CIA!"

"Believe it or not, I'm a relatively low-level clerk," Carolyn Howorth told him. If he wanted to jump to the conclusion that she was CIA, that was fine with her. "I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Or the right place, right time," he said with feeling. They were seated at the desk in Esterhausen's stateroom. Late last night, he'd brought her down here, and she'd slept here. Only slept; Esterhausen had gallantly let her have the queen-sized bed while he took the double-wide love-seat sofa. It was, Howorth was forced to admit, infinitely better than blankets and life jackets in a lifeboat outside.

She'd been up early, however, sending more reports back to GCHQ and NSA Headquarters and also trying to raise Mohamed Ghailiani.

He was alive. She was fairly certain of that, now. According to GCHQ, which was closely monitoring every transmission in and out of the Atlantis Queen, another JPEG photo of Ghailiani's wife and daughter had been transmitted to his e-mail account on Tuesday, again on Wednesday, and then yet again that morning. The images weren't piling up in his in-box, either, but were being opened each morning. With Ghailiani's e-mail account password, she could check that. If he had been killed, there would have been no reason to keep Nouzha and Zahra Ghailiani alive, no need to keep e-mailing photographs of them with a fresh copy of the Guardian each morning. Both women would have been dead within hours of Mohamed Ghailiani's death.

The question was whether or not she could develop the guy as an agent-in-place. He'd been co-opted by the terrorists through threats to his family; perhaps he could be turned if those threats could be eliminated. However, he'd been so terrified the other day, so broken, that she wasn't sure he would be of any use even if she could elicit his cooperation.

Early that morning, she'd finished typing out an exploratory e-mail, addressed it to Ghailiani's account, and clicked send. The slow packet transmission rate meant that it would take a while to get there, and she had no idea when he would again be checking his shipboard account.

But right now she had nothing but time. Her fingers clattered over the keyboard and, suddenly, a mail icon popped up. She clicked on it.

Who are you?

She stared at the three words for a long moment. The e should be from Ghailiani himself, but there was always the possibility that someone else, one of the terrorists, was reading his e-mail for him. It was possible that they didn't trust him to access his e-mail without someone reading over his shoulder. So Who are you? might be from Ghailiani, or it might be from a tango.

A friend, she typed back. You know me. I can help you. She pressed send.

It would take a while for Jerry's computer to send the message at its deliberate electronic snail's pace. She waited.

They'd been watching them all day.

MI5 had found the flat two days before, on Tuesday afternoon. A policeman had called in the black sedan with its license registration of Y9WE83K, parked on Waterhouse Lane in front of a line of two-story brown-stone row houses in an aging section of town. The neighborhood was just three miles across town from the Ghailiani residence, an easy drive out the A3057.

MI5 agents had questioned neighbors, learning from them that two men, foreign-looking and secretive, had moved into the vacant flat only two weeks earlier. The two apparently kept to themselves — and that of itself was enough to attract attention and elicit comment in a clannish and close-knit community such as Millbrook.

MI5 had talked to the people living next door, a newly married Indian couple named Rajeesh. The two had been temporarily evicted on Tuesday, moved to a hotel in Southampton for the duration, and with the promise that the government would take care of any damages. MI5 had moved in, entering the flat from the rear two at a time in order to try to avoid alerting the residents at Number 1240 next door. Lia DeFrancesca and Ilya Akulinin had arrived on Wednesday, setting up a satellite radio link with both MI5 and GCHQ.

Early on Thursday morning, while it was still dark in the hours before dawn, the SAS had arrived as well. The takedown, code-named Imperial, was a go.

The upstairs of the Rajeesh apartment had been transformed into a military command post, the furniture moved downstairs, the carpets rolled up, and folding chairs and tables brought in for the banks of computers and monitors being used by the HRT personnel. Two technicians had used silenced electrical saws to cut through the south wall, which, according to architectural plans from the local planning-board office, should back up against the north wall of the suspect's bedroom. Working with extreme and methodical care in absolute silence, they brought down a seven-foot-high, nine-foot-wide section of lath and plaster wall, exposing the back side of the suspect's wall and the nine-inch gap between the two.

A hand drill was used to very, very slowly bore into this final barrier, a sheet of aging lath and plaster half an inch thick. The resultant hole was scarcely wider than a finishing nail, but it accepted the stiff end of a horoscope probe, connected by a fiber-optic cable to a TV monitor on a folding table several feet away.

The horoscope's fish-eye lens revealed nearly all of the room next door, and it provided the final proof that MI5 had found the right place. Two women could be seen tied on the bed. Two and sometimes three men came and went. Sensitive microphones placed against the wall's interior side let the HRT team hear everything that happened, every word that was spoken. A couple of Arabic-speaking translators were brought in, who sat and listened to everything as the recorders rolled.

But Imperial couldn't go in immediately. Clearance needed to be won from higher levels of the bureaucracy, and unless the two victims were in immediate danger, an entry warrant needed to be approved by the local magistrate. The watchers at first couldn't see either of the women's faces, and there was at least a small chance that MI5 was peeking in on a kinky sex scene rather than an actual kidnapping.

So they watched, and they recorded. Both women were positively identified when their captors temporarily released them to let them use the toilet or to allow them to eat. The warrant didn't come through until late Thursday, however. The government was still stinging from allegations of abridged citizens' rights and illegal surveillance issues, and magistrates were being a lot more cautious now to safeguard citizens' rights to privacy.

And so MI5, the SAS HRT, and the two American liaisons had watched and listened as, early Thursday morning, one of the men photographed the women in the bed with a folded newspaper, then downloaded the image onto a laptop computer and sent it off. They watched in helpless and steadily building fury as the captors talked among themselves or described to the two helpless women in gruesome detail just what they were going to do with them when they were no longer needed.

Captain Burns, in charge of the HRT, was ready to go in without a warrant on the assumption that the women were in imminent danger. He was convinced to wait by Ronald Harriman, the senior MI5 officer on the scene. If the HRT went through that wall and things went badly, if the tangos on the other side of that wall were able to get word to the terrorists at sea, Mohamed Ghailiani might become a liability and die… and that might mean repercussions that would result in SAS casualties on the Atlantis Queen as well. In the wake of the abortive helicopter attack on Tuesday, everyone was being super-cautious and playing it strictly by the book.

And so they waited.

The warrant and final approval for the assault came through by mid-afternoon on Thursday. Burns and Harriman both agreed that they would wait a few hours more. The tangos seemed to have established a routine; each evening, one of their number would leave the flat and buy take-out food. On Wednesday night, they had watched the terrorists gather in a group, all three of them standing together around a table on the far side of the bedroom from the captives. If they followed the same pattern on Thursday, that was when the hostage rescue team would go in.

At around six-thirty, one of the tangos left to get dinner. By this time, the SAS troopers had placed a large loop of yellow det cord against the interior of the lath and plaster wall, with extra lumps of C-4 placed as cutting charges against the exposed studs. Detonators were placed at several points along the det cord and in every C-4 charge, with all of them carefully woven together by wires to the firing box in the middle of the room. The HRT unit prepared for the assault, each man wearing black battle dress, combat harness, balaclava, and gas mask and carrying H&K MP5 submachine guns.

Lia DeFrancesca sat with the MI5 technical people, watching the screen. Harriman signaled that spotters outside were watching the man who'd left to get food and was returning, and four SAS troopers took their place at the jump-off, facing the old plaster wall and detcord-woven studs. Two more stood to either side of the detcord loop, well back from the blast zone but ready to move in support of the four-man unit. A military doctor and a pair of medical specialists waited in the rear, as seconds dragged by and the Imperial HRT waited for the final signal.

A moment later, clearly visible on the monitor, the man who'd gone for food entered the bedroom with a brown paper bag, which he took to the table. The other two tangos had been sitting beside the bed teasing their prisoners. Both of the men stood and walked to the table, still laughing. They had pistols tucked into their belts; three AK-47s had previously been spotted leaning against a wall beside the window overlooking the street, as though the tangos were ready for a police siege.

As they began removing cartons of Lebanese takeout from the bag, DeFrancesca gave Burns a thumbs-up and Burns pointed at the trooper manning the firing box. The man pressed a button, and the det cord exploded, a dazzling, lopsided circle of fierce white light accompanied by a startlingly loud blast as the wall disintegrated in plaster dust, smoke, and splinters.

On the monitor, all three men were swatted back from the blast; the four troopers on point rushed through the sudden opening while plaster and chunks of wood were still falling, their H&Ks tucked up against their shoulders, already firing as they moved.

Two of the terrorists, the two with pistols, were hit and killed instantly. The third, sprawled on the debris-covered floor, groped blindly for one of the AKs. One of the troopers brought his boot down on the man's arm and shoved the muzzle of his weapon against the man's skull. The other troopers moved to different corners of the room, then positioned themselves to cover the door leading to the hallway and stairs outside.

"Clear!" one of the HRT troopers yelled.

The entire assault had taken less than three seconds.

Howorth read the last message from Ghailiani: how cani truist you?

The answer, of course, was that he couldn't… any more than she could trust him, no matter how badly spelled his e-mail reply was. She wondered if he'd composed that last while actually talking with one of the terrorists, pretending to work, perhaps, while typing quickly and blindly before hitting the send key.

But she'd moments before received confirmation from GCHQ that the Imperial assault had gone down without a hitch, and that the proof Ghailiani needed before committing himself was already being transmitted.

Take a look at the next mail from home, she typed. Open it as an HTML document and click on the link. She hit send.

Ghailiani sat at his workstation, staring at his in-box folder for his e-mail. Haqqani was with him, seated at another console. He couldn't see Ghailiani's screen.

This latest e-mail was from an unknown sender, someone ashore. The woman, Janet Carroll, had told him it would be coming, however, hinting that it would have the proof he needed.

He held his breath as he clicked on the mail icon.

A photograph opened in front of him, a somewhat grainy image of the sort taken by a cell-phone camera, but still in full color and with a level of detail that left his arms and knees weak, left him trembling, had his heart pounding in his chest.

It was yet another digital photograph of Nouzha and his beloved Zahra, but this time, instead of being another in a sickening series of photos depicting a slow, ongoing nightmare of a striptease, Zahra and Nouzha were free, free

The bedroom in which they'd been held was utterly trashed, with pieces of wood scattered everywhere and a layer of plaster dust over everything and everyone, including both of the two women. His wife and daughter were standing up, blankets over their shoulders and wrapped close around them as British military personnel helped them walk. Several of their rescuers were visible in the photo, anonymous in black military jumpsuits and bulletproof vests, knit balaclavas, and full-face gas masks.

Both women were crying, the tears streaking the film of plaster dust on their faces like makeup. Underneath the photo, someone had typed: They're okay. On way to hospital for checkup. Both safe. Following that line were two blue-highlighted words: Click here.

They were safe!…

"What's wrong?" Haqqani asked, his voice sharp.

Ghailiani realized that tears were running down his own face, that his hands were shaking. Somehow, he managed to reach out and hit the key that closed the image. "I… I'm thinking about my family," he said. "How I might not see them again… "

"Do what we tell you and they'll be safe," Haqqani said with a shrug. "Allah will keep them safe."

He already has, Ghailiani thought. Allah, and someone named Janet Carroll.

"So… am I ever going to get my computer back?" Jerry Esterhausen asked.

They'd come back up to Deck Nine and the casino earlier that evening, ordering dinner and sitting with the handful of passengers who seemed to have made the Pyramid Club their preferred gathering spot. So far, their terrorist captors had made no move to sequester them or to limit their freedom to move around, save to ban them from a handful of key shipboard areas. The armed intruders went about their work or stood guard in certain spots scattered about the ship and for the most part didn't interfere with the passengers when they went out to get meals or to sit in small groups in places like the casino and talk.

Questions about the safety of people who'd disappeared were ignored or, at best, shunted aside with a curt statement that they were safe so long as the rest of the crew and passengers made no trouble.

And none of the hijackers would reply to questions about how much longer this drama would play out or what was going to happen to the passengers of the ship when they arrived at their unknown destination.

"Just one more moment," she said. Howorth looked around the casino, checking to see if anyone was watching. One tango was standing inside the glass doors leading out to the pool deck, and two more were visible just outside in the spill of light from within the room. No one was paying attention to her or Esterhausen, seated in a booth in an out-of-the-way corner. She opened the latest e-mail from Ghailiani and read it.

Saw picture. Thank you. From bottom of heart thank you. Clicked HTML page. Nothing. Now what? And this one was signed: Ghailiani.

Just wait, she typed back, and then clicked send. The clock on Esterhausen's laptop, which was still set to GMT, read: "10:18 PM." If the mission GCHQ had mentioned in its last e-mail to her was on schedule, they should be seeing some action here within just a few more hours.

There was a sudden commotion at the forward door to the casino. Several passengers — a handful of elderly women and men — had been on the point of leaving, but they were being ordered back into the casino by one of the hijackers. "No! No!" the man shouted. "You stay here, now!"

"What's the meaning of this?" another man demanded.

The hijacker pushed him back with a jab from his rifle. "All of you, stay here now! No move anywhere!"

"What the hell?" Esterhausen asked.

"I think they're getting nervous about us moving around," Howorth told him. "Maybe they're watching our aircraft out there, following us."

"What does it mean?"

"That things are going to start happening damned fast, now."

Howorth set up one final e-mail, this one addressed to GCHQ and the NSA: Ghailiani clicked HTML page. Carrousel in casino, Deck 9, 2218 EST Two tangos outside by Atlas Pool, one inside casino. Ready to receive visitors.

Again she hit send. The message was encrypted using a GCHQ cipher originally created at Fort Meade, so in the unlikely event that someone in Ship's Security was aware of her mail, they weren't reading it.

"Okay, Jerry," Carolyn said, closing the e-mail account and sliding the computer across the table to Esterhausen. "It's all yours."

"What did you do?"

She shrugged. "Nothing much. Called down the wrath of God on the unbelievers, maybe. Just a little."

"I don't understand."

"You will," Carolyn Howorth said. "Just be patient, and you will."

The V-22 Osprey droned through the night, its enormous twin props in the forward flight configuration, driving the aircraft along at just over 270 knots. On the red-lit cargo deck, twenty-four men in combat dress that gave them the look of malevolent beings from another world quietly waited, their rucksacks parked between their booted feet.

"We're approaching the drop zone, Mr. Dean," the cargo master said over the intercom. "Ten more minutes to drop." "Right."

Dean looked aft along the twin lines of black-garbed and masked men seated in the blood-tinted glow of the Osprey's cargo deck. Members of the ultra-secret Black Cat Bravo assault force assigned to the NSA's Deep Black program, they were the National Security Agency's premier military strike team — or would be after tonight. This would be their first operational mission.

Over the past several years of Deep Black's operational history, Desk Three agents had been limited in combat to the firepower they could carry on their person — generally a semiautomatic pistol. The standard wisdom of covert ops held that if you actually needed to use a firearm, your mission had failed.

There were times, however, when something more was needed than a sound-suppressed pistol, a means of delivering major firepower with surgical precision. Various branches of the U. S. military had such units — the Army's Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces, the U. S. Marines' Force Recon, the Navy's SEAL Teams — and Deep Black's Desk Three had worked with all of them, generally through the auspices of USSOCOM, the U. S. Special Operations Command.

But for the past two years Rubens and Charlie Dean both had been pushing for a special-capabilities unit answerable solely to Desk Three. The need had become particularly evident last year, when Dean had undertaken a Desk Three op in the Arctic far north and the takedown of a Russian ship illegally holding American personnel who'd been operating an ice cap weather station. A SEAL assault unit had taken the ship, but difficulties in command control, in communications, and between individual personnel had caused difficulties that Black Cat was designed to prevent.

The Black Cat units, Alpha on the West Coast, Bravo on the East, were the result.

Technically, the team members were, like Dean, civilians — "technically" because although the NSA was subordinate to the U. S. Department of Defense, with either a lieutenant general or a vice admiral as director, the Agency operated in a kind of twilight world straddling both the civilian and the military defense communities.

Of course, the NSA officially didn't even have a field-active component or human intelligence capabilities. Its original charter called for the Agency to handle electronic and signals intelligence — SIGINT — only, which it did by monitoring radio broadcasts, phone and satellite communications, and Internet connections worldwide.

But Desk Three existed because sometimes a human being had to place a listening device in a telephone or an intercept unit inside a computer keyboard to eavesdrop on communications. And sometimes those humans needed a lot of firepower, fast.

Hence, Black Cat.

"Cougars!" Dean called over the team's radio channel. "Switch to tank oh-two!"

The Osprey's cargo deck had already been depressurized, and every man there was breathing pure oxygen through an attachment to 02 lines along the cargo deck's internal fuselage walls. They'd been breathing pure oxygen for the past forty minutes in order to flush all of the nitrogen out of their bloodstreams. Each man now made the switch-over to his own, personal oxygen bottle, throwing a connector switch, then unthreading the aircraft supply line from their oxygen system: At these altitudes there simply wasn't enough oxygen in the air to keep a man aware and conscious for more than a few minutes.

One by one, the men along the starboard side each raised a black-gloved fist with the thumb extended up. The Osprey could carry twenty-four passengeis in two rows of seats, more if they were floor-loaded. Dean and his eleven men were Cougar Team. The twelve men on the port side comprised Jaguar Team and would remain in reserve.

"Cougars! Prepare for jump!"

The eleven men along the starboard side of the aircraft stood as one.

The bad guys had thrown the team a curve just over twenty-four hours ago by separating the two ships that, until now, had been lashed together. The Atlantis Queen was still less than half a mile away from the Pacific Sandpiper, but the two vessels would have to be taken down separately now.

And so a second assault force was approaching the Sandpiper on board the USS Ohio with an ASDS riding piggyback on its after deck and Navy SEALs preparing to deploy. Jaguar Team, which originally had been intended to land on the Sandpiper, would now hang back in the orbiting Osprey and jump where they were needed.

The Cougars began going through their final checkout.

Dean pressed a key on the panel strapped to his left forearm, and the LED screen lit up with pertinent data — his altitude above sea level, now 22,745 feet; the temperature outside, minus twenty-three degrees; the wind speed downloaded from the Osprey's computer; the atmospheric pressure… it was all there, right down to the wind speed above the water at the target. He pressed another key, and the atmospheric data were replaced by a bio stats screen, including, again, the outside temperature, as well as heart rate, blood pressure, and the flow rate of 02 through his face mask.

He pressed a third key, and those data were replaced by a navigational screen showing his precise longitude and latitude, plus his current velocity — 271 knots — as clocked by NAVSTAR-GPS satellites in medium Earth orbit, eleven thousand miles overhead. Most important was the tiny, glowing red arrow on the extreme right, by his wrist, accompanied by the numerals 96845, the last three of which were flickering so quickly they were blurred as the number dwindled. It was the range, in yards, to the target, which now lay about fifty-five miles to the northeast. The arrow gave the direction to. the Atlantis Queen and was now pointed at the front of the Osprey's troop bay.

The wrist pad gave him all the data he needed to conduct a HAHO paradrop and landing on what otherwise would have been an impossible target — a moving target, in pitch-blackness, that was just seventy feet long and about fifty wide.

Each of the other men in the assault had the same device, and each was cycling through the different screens now, making sure they were operational. Once certain that their electronic systems were good to go, they began the time-honored physical check, with each man checking the straps, weapons, gear, and buckles of the man beside him, then standing still as the two switched roles.

Each man in the assault team wore a black GORE-TEX jumpsuit over a Polartec liner, cold-weather gloves and overboots, and an HGU-55/P parachutist's helmet with a built-in communications system that would allow him to talk to the other team members and, via a relay through a nearby AWACs aircraft, with Desk Three. His lower face was covered by an MBU-12P pressure demand oxygen mask. His left eye was covered by an AN/PVS-14D night-vision monocular, which left his right eye dark-adapted in the dim red glow of the Osprey's cabin lights.

They carried a mix of weapons. Four, including Dean, carried the ubiquitous H&K SD5 with infrared laser targeting mounts and an integral sound suppressor. Four others carried a fairly new entry in the U. S. military arsenal, the AA-12 automatic combat shotgun, while the last four carried CAR-15 assault weapons. Each man also carried a SIG SAUER P226 with a sound suppressor screwed tight to the muzzle.

Dean finished checking the straps and harness fastenings on Tom Fredericks, the man immediately in front of him, making sure in particular that his combat shotgun was secure on his back and the hose from his 02 cylinder was clear and not going to be torn by an opening parachute. Then Dean clapped Fredericks on the shoulder and allowed the other man to check him.

Final checkout complete, the twelve of them stood single file, facing the still-closed boarding ramp of the aircraft.

And then there was nothing to do but wait.