Sea Of Terror

Chapter 25

The terrorist had turned at the noise, looking up to see Jerry Esterhausen's robot leaning toward him, arms outstretched.

The man panicked. He screamed and the AK in his hand went off; he was holding the weapon one-handed, and the muzzle climbed sharply with the recoil, out of control. People in the club screamed, some diving for the floor as stray rounds slammed into bulkheads and the ceiling. Bullets cracked and whined, some shattering the plastic woman-shaped torso shell of the robot, some ricocheting from tooled steel. The monitor at the top of the unit exploded in flying glass.

But as Jerry Esterhausen had pointed out on another occasion, the robot's computer brain was located in the machine's base. From across the room the engineer pressed a key and swiped his finger across the touchpad once again, and the machine's arms snapped closed like a trap, moving with mind-numbing speed, gathering in the terrified hijacker and his weapon and smashing him close against its torso in a metal embrace.

An instant later, the glass door behind him slid open and a nightmare shape entered — all in black, the form turned monstrous by heavy clothing, combat vest, helmet, and mask. The man advanced with a submachine gun tucked up tight against his shoulder, moving as though weapon and man were one and the same.

The terrorist gave a strangled scream, struggling against the relentless, backbreaking steel hug. The black-clad apparition pivoted slightly at the sound and fired, putting two rounds into the terrorist's head, the shots no louder than a sharp click. Spent brass tinkled and danced along the casino floor in the deathly silence that had followed the parachutist's entrance.

Please, sir! You're making me blush!"

With that, a number of civilians started to rise. Someone cheered, the cheer joined by another, and then another.

"Quiet!" Carolyn Howorth startled herself with the strength of her bellow. Her voice cut through the rising crowd noise and brought the mob to a halt. "Everyone quiet!

"Everyone stay down!" the black apparition by the door shouted. He kept the submachine gun up against his shoulder, pivoting this way and that, giving the appearance of being a machine himself, one seeking its next target. "Everyone stay down, stay calm, and we'll get you out of this!"

A second man in helmet, mask, and combat gear entered the open door and the two separated, putting their backs against the bulkheads to either side of the rear wall.

"Don't shoot," Howorth called. "You got them all in here!"

"Atlas Pool deck clear!" one of the figures said. "Casino clear! Three tangos down!"

And another black figure touched down on the deck outside, moving too fast. He took three running steps as he tried to come to a halt and fell into one of the two hot tubs set to either side of the swimming pool.

"In Allah's name, what is happening?" Khalid demanded. He held the radio against His ear. "Tahir! Report!" He shook the radio in frustration, then put it to his ear again. "El Hakim! Come in! This is Khalid. Talk to me!"

There was nothing, no response but static.

He changed channels. "Aziz! Are you there?"

"Yes, Amir!"

Khalid felt, first, relief at hearing the voice, followed almost at once by a deadly and cold sense of purpose. A radio failure by itself he would accept as accident — a dead battery, perhaps — but to have all three of the men guarding the stern deck area of the ship go silent at the same time that the security cameras and the shipboard monitor system switched off could not be coincidence.

"We have lost touch with the guards at the back of the ship," he said. "We may have unwanted visitors aboard. Where are you?"

"Grand Staircase, going up," Aziz replied. He sounded out of breath. "Deck Five!"

"Get to the casino as quickly as you can. Watch out for an ambush!"

"Yes, Amir!"

"Keep me informed! Out!"

Khalid thought for a moment more, studying the four men seated at the Security Office consoles. Beyond, the door into the IT center was open, and he could see two more men there… Hamud Haqqani and Ghailiani. Slipping the radio into its belt holster, Khalid strode into the IT center.

"What has happened to the security systems?" he demanded.

"Amir, we don't know," Haqqani said. "The main computer may have gone offline for a moment."

"Would that turn off the security cameras?"

"Amir, I don't knowl"

"Ghailiani? You know these systems! What's happened?"

Ghailiani turned in his seat, his eyes locking with Khalid's. "I don't know, either," he said. "All systems appear to be functioning normally, except for the cameras and the security scanners. We could try to reboot. That will take about twenty minutes."

Khalid considered Ghailiani for a second. The man was… calm, icy calm, when everyone else in the Security-IT suite was stressed to the point of near hysteria.

What had the man done?

Probably nothing. Ghailiani was weak and indecisive, paralyzed by the threat to his family. He wouldn't have done anything on his own. His current calm was probably simple fatalism… a numb acceptance that things were out of his control.

But Khalid would definitely ask some more probing questions later, perhaps after having the men at the Millbrook safehouse work on Ghailiani's daughter for a time and send him some more photographs of the process.

"Twenty minutes is too long," Khalid said. "You have five minutes to tell me what is happening to the security systems on this ship."

He turned and left, walking swiftly through the Security Office and out into the Deck Eleven passageway. Through the security doors — he was relieved to see that they, at least, were still working as he swiped his key card — and up the service stairwell beyond. He emerged, seconds later, in the passageway leading to the radio room and the bridge.

"The Americans are continuing their transmissions, Amir," Fakhet told him as he passed the open door to the radio room. "They say they will give us whatever we want, but that we — "

"Ignore them," Khalid snapped. He used his card to go onto the bridge. Three of his men looked at him curiously, Obeidat, Mohawal, and Abdallah. Abdul Mohawal was at the ship's wheel.

"Come hard right!" Khalid ordered. "Steer north!"

"Yes, Amir!"

"Fakhet!"

"Yes, Amir!" the radio operator called from the next compartment.

"Call the Pacific Sandpiper. We need them!"

"At once, Amir!"

It wasn't yet too late.

"This is Eleven. Target is changing course," sounded in Dean's helmet receiver. "Stay with him."

Dean saw the ship turning, but the movement was slow and ponderous. The hijackers were probably hoping to throw off the landings of any more parachutists, but a cruise ship of that size simply couldn't maneuver like a speedboat. Dean watched the silhouette of Gene Podalski, Cougar Eleven, touch down on the brightly lit pool deck now just a few hundred feet ahead. He tugged slightly at the ram-air chute's controls, bleeding off some of his forward speed, and held his breath as the deck swooped up to meet him.

He touched down on the hard wooden planking, taking a few steps to keep his balance, then collapsed the chute behind him. The other Cougar team members crouched on the deck, either forming a defensive perimeter, moving inside, or gathering up their chutes and jump gear.

They'd all made it! Some of the op planners, he'd known, had insisted that it would be impossible to get all of the chutists down safely onto that tiny aft deck of a moving ship. In fact, part of each man's gear included a tightly packaged, inflatable one-man raft, just in case he missed the target and ended up in the sea. It looked like Brisard had managed to fall into one of the aft deck pools, but he was the only one who'd gotten wet.

Dean unsnapped his harness, let his billowing chute, reserve chute, and harness go over the side. As he stepped inside the casino, he saw Carolyn J. Howorth and felt a further surge of relief.

"Hey, CJ," he said, pulling off his oxygen mask, then raising his monocular. "Enjoying your cruise?"

"Charlie!" Her eyes were wide. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Rescuing you," he said. "Unless you insist on doing it yourself."

"Looks like trouble headed their way, sir," Caravaggio said.

Rubens looked at the big screen with its side-by-side schematics of the Atlantis Queen's decks. A tight group of green dots was clustered in the Grand Staircase on Decks Seven and Eight. They appeared to be going up, toward Deck Nine. "Dean?" he said. "Yeah. Copy."

"You've got eight hostiles one deck down, coming up the main staircase. They're moving slow, but you don't have more than a couple of minutes."

"Right."

A drive-by upload, the GCHQ woman had called it. Send an e-mail in HTML format to a target computer. Get someone with access to that e-mail to open it and click on a hypertext line. The result was an influx of code into the target computer — a carefully crafted virus, in fact — that took over that computer and gave the sender administrative control.

In short, the Adantis Queen's security and IT computer network was now being run by the Art Room, almost a thousand miles away. So far as the hijackers were concerned, everything was running normally… or it had been until Rubens had ordered the cameras switched off and the security overwatch display rerouted to the Art Room and switched off on the ship.

It gave Dean and his men a technological edge where they most needed one.

"Keep us posted," Dean said. Swiftly he started peeling off his clothing.

"What the hell are you doing?" Howorth asked.

"Plan A," Dean replied, standing on one foot as he peeled off the jumpsuit. "Walters! You're with me!"

"Got it."

Dean had to sit down to peel off the Polartec long johns. "The rest of you.. police the area and get yourselves and all of your gear behind that bar. And… someone get that guy down off the robot."

Operation Neptune had come in with two possible mission plans, depending on the situation they discovered when they got on board. While they were prepared to launch a general assault — Plan B — with some of them heading down to the cargo hold and the rest heading for the bridge, they were also prepared to carry out the original plan, which had been to infiltrate the ship by posing as passengers. Each of the Black Cat parachutists had a change of civilian clothing — jeans, pullover sweaters, socks, tennis shoes — rolled up inside the rucksack he'd carried secured to his harnesses during their jump.

"They're all on Deck Nine," Rubens' voice said in Dean's head. "Looks like they're sorting things out among themselves."

Dean fastened his jeans and tugged his shoes on — to hell with the socks. As he dressed, he glanced around the casino, looking at the crowd surrounding them, trying to take their measure. A number of them were elderly. Others were younger but scared. There was always the possibility that one or more terrorists had infiltrated themselves among the hostages. In fact, in a normal hostage crisis takedown, the rescue team would be using zip strips to immobilize everybody they found inside, the objective, just in case.

That simply wasn't practical here — or desirable, given that they might need to move these people out quickly. But Dean was alert to the possibility that not all of these civilians were innocents.

He pulled his sweater down over his head, unholstered his pistol, a SIG Sauer P226, screwed the sound suppressor onto the muzzle, and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, tugging the sweater's hem low to hide it. Nearby, Walters did the same.

"Listen up, people!" Dean called. "When they come in here, as far as you know, a bunch of guys in black shot those three, then headed up the steps outside. We'll be watching, in case they try anything, okay?"

The crowd responded with a murmured assent.

"When are you getting us off the ship?" an older man called.

"As soon as we can. Be patient."

"What if they're coming to kill us?" Howorth asked.

"We don't plan on letting them," Dean replied. "Your e-mails said they were probably taking people who got in the way to the theater, right?"

"That's right. Deck One, toward the bow."

"If that bunch of tangos coming aft don't find us, either they're going to herd you all forward to be with the rest, or…"

"Or what?"

"Or we'll take them down here," Dean said. He wouldn't admit to her that those tangos could be an execution squad. That was unlikely, though. The terrorists wouldn't start killing their hostages until they knew things were going bad.

Ten of the Black Cat team members vanished with weapons and gear into the bar area to one side of the casino, ducking low to stay out of sight. It wouldn't hide them if the tangos searched carefully, but Dean doubted that they would be in a patient mood.

The young man with glasses who'd been hovering near Howorth did something with his laptop, and the robot near the outside door opened its arms. Walters dragged the body to a spot near the door onto the deck and left it there with the AK beside it.

"Remember!" Dean told the quietly watching people. "Guys in black came in, you're not sure how many. Maybe five or six. They shot these three, then went up the outside stairs." According to the ship's deck plans he'd been studying, there were two sets of curving steps, port and starboard, leading from Deck Nine up to Deck Ten and an outside promenade running forward to the Kleito Bar. It would be a quick and immediate way to reach the bridge and the Security Office, an obvious attack route.

"They're coming your way," Rubens said in Dean's ear. "They're at the door"

Dean and Walters mixed in with the civilians, urging them to scatter more around the casino rather than provide a bunched-up target. The door at the back of the casino banged open, and six men in khaki with AK-47s burst inside.

They came in with their guns raised, ready to start shooting. "Everybody stay where you are!" one shouted, his voice shrill. "Everybody don't move!"

"Don't shoot!" Dean yelled. "They're not here!" This was the critical moment. If this was an execution squad, they could start shooting in an instant. Dean wanted to get them talking instead.

"Who is not here?" one of the gunmen yelled back. The others advanced cautiously, weapons up.

"A bunch of guys all in black parachuted down on the pool deck!" Howorth called out. "They… they shot your men!…"

"They're not here," the guy with the laptop added. "They all went back outside and up the stairs to Deck Ten!"

"How many?" the hijacker demanded. "How many were there?"

"I'm not sure," an elderly woman on the other side of the room said. "Maybe five or six?"

The tangos advanced, then, some moving among the passengers, roughly shoving them aside, others making for the door leading outside. One checked the dead terrorist inside; another checked the two on the deck. One of them had a small, handheld radio and was talking into it in rapid-fire Arabic.

Dean watched as the terrorists gave the room a cursory check, though they never even approached the bar. The one with the radio began gesturing and shouting. "All of you! We move you to safe location."

"Wait!" Howorth said. "Where are you taking us?"

"We take you someplace safe. Now move! Move!"

Dean allowed himself to be herded along, one of the passengers. The skinny guy started to pick up his laptop, but one of the gunmen jabbed the muzzle of his AK against the guy's side. "No! You leave it!"

"But that's my computer!"

"Leave it, Jerry!" Howorth said. "Damn it, you can get it later!…"

The crowd of civilians began moving out into the passageway, hurried along by their captors.

A group of eighteen or twenty of the civilians in the casino were older people, in their sixties or seventies or even older. One was a man in a wheelchair. Several of the women had walkers, and more were leaning on canes. As the gunmen hurried the mob forward toward the door, the group swiftly fell behind, unable to keep up. One of the gunmen shoved an elderly woman and knocked her down. The gunman snarled something and raised his rifle as if he was going to strike her with it.

Dean whirled and caught the terrorist's arm, stopping him. The man gaped at him, eyes wide.

"Don't," Dean said in a firm voice. "Don't. They're old; they can't hurt you."

The gunman wrenched his arm free, then swung the butt of his rifle at Dean's face. Dean sidestepped, but the stick grazed the side of his head, knocking him back a step. The gunman hovered there, as though trying to decide who to kill, Dean or the old woman.

" 'Do no harm to the elderly, and do not strike the infirm, for it is hateful in the eyes of Allah,'" Dean said, touching the wound on his scalp with his fingertips. They came away slick with blood. "Isn't that what your Qur'an says?"

"You… you know the holy book, the words of the Prophet?"

"A little. I know it teaches you that if you kill the innocent, you burn in Hell!"

The man's eyes widened a bit more. "Leave them, Rashid!" another gunman said.

Turning suddenly, he waved the elderly group away. "Go back!" he said. "All of you! Go back! Stay here!"

Dean helped the woman up off the deck. "Thank you, young man," she said. "Just like Bruce Willis!"

A passenger, an older man, took her hand. "Come along, Ms. Jordan. Let's stay out of their way."

One of the gunmen was left behind to collect the three dropped AK assault rifles. The others urged the younger captives forward. One nudged Dean in the ribs with his rifle. "Now move! Quick! Yallah!"

Dean let himself be nudged along.

"That was very brave," Howorth said quietly, moving close beside him as they moved into the passageway. "Do you really know the Qur'an?"

Dean glanced around to make sure none of the terrorists was within earshot. "No," he whispered, "and neither do they. Most of them, anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"In my experience, most Christians don't know the Bible very well. My guess is that most Muslims are the same with the Qur'an. The fundamentalists like to pick and choose which verses they'll use, and argue about interpretations… but only the scholars know the book well. Just like with most Christians."

"And my guess is that you're damned lucky!"

The group hurried forward through the ship.

"Very well," Khalid said, speaking into the radio handset. "Hurry!"

He handed the microphone back to Fakhet, then stepped back out onto the bridge. The Pacific Sandpiper was a mile away, and it would take her time to complete her turn.

Khalid considered keeping the Adantis Queen on the same heading, due north. The coast of Massachusetts was out there, the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. If he ran the Queen aground there, it would create an appropriately spectacular disaster.

But not, perhaps, spectacular enough. Al-Qaeda's message would be so much sharper, so much more to the point, if it was delivered to Manhattan. "Bring us back to the left," he told the man at the helm. "And reduce speed to ten knots." Khalid wanted the Pacific Sandpiper to catch up with them.

Aziz had reported in moments before. Passengers in the casino said they'd seen black-clad men parachute onto the pool deck — probably SAS. They'd apparently killed three guards back there and now were on Deck Ten, moving forward.

Khalid retrieved his AKM assault rifle from the electronic chart table and checked the action. Let them come. He was ready for them.

As for the passengers, he'd ordered them moved to the Neptune Theater. If there was going to be a firelight, he wanted them in a controlled place, where he could have his men begin shooting them if the attackers got too close.

And as a last resort, he would detonate the radioactive canisters in the hold.

Yaqub Nehim grinned down at the struggling woman. "Perhaps you would like it if we tied your hands again?" He let his hand move along her leg, caressing.

"Get your hands off of me, you asshole!" the woman screamed. She tried to slap him, and he blocked the clumsy swing easily.

"You son of a bitch! Leave her alone!" The ship's chief security officer lunged at him, but Nehim whipped the muzzle of his pistol around and caught the man on the side of his face.

"Yaqub!" Ra'id Hijazi called from farther up the theater aisle. "Leave the woman alone! This is not the time!"

"Mind your own business, Ra'id! I've been looking forward to this since we came on board!" Yaqub gave a harsh, bitter laugh. "It's not like any of us will survive this voyage, right?"

"Women are a trap of Satan!" Hijazi said, quoting an ancient hadith, a traditional quote from the sayings of Mohammed.

"'Forbidden are married women,'" Nehim replied, "'except those you own as slaves!' Surah Four-twenty! We can do as we like with these whores!"

It wasn't rape and it wasn't illegal when the woman refused to be properly dressed. These Western bitches paraded around half-naked all the time, putting themselves on display. Often they did not even go out accompanied by a husband or another male relative. They deserved whatever they got. In fact, most fundamentalist Islamic regimes condoned forcing condemned female prisoners to have sex, since the holy Qur'an forbade putting a virgin to death.

He doubted that these women were virgins, but they all were certainly under a sentence of death. It wouldn't hurt to make sure, just with one of them…

Yaqub Nehim cared little for the Sharia or the tenets of his religion, and his knowledge of the Qur'an extended just far enough to provide a rationalization for what he would have done anyway. He'd gotten into trouble with the authorities in his native Saudi Arabia over his attempt to have sex with a foreign woman, an Italian, in Medina five years ago. The ulema hearing Yaqub's case, the religious judge, had offered him a choice — prison or joining a jihadist group dedicated to destroying the enemies of Islam.

He'd accepted recruitment. He knew what Saudi prisons were like.

As for accepting martyrdom… well, there was still time. Perhaps one of the lifeboats…

The door at the back of the theater banged open, and passengers spilled inside. Nehim let go of the struggling woman and stood, raising his AK-47 in case this was the vanguard of a prisoner revolt. Then he saw Aziz and Baqr and others of his mujahideen comrades, funneling the prisoners in through the door.

"What have you brought us, Rashid?" he asked Aziz. There were attractive women in this group as well. One in particular…

"They were in the casino," Aziz replied. He glanced at the woman in the seat next to Nehim, who was trying to straighten her clothing. "None of that, Nehim," he snapped. "We have work to do. Holy work!"

"What work?"

"The enemy has boarded the ship! Three of our brothers are dead! Guard the prisoners well, and keep your pants buckled. There will be time for games later!"

Nehim helped herd the new batch of prisoners down the aisle as Aziz and the others turned and headed back out into the Deck One mall area. Hijazi was giving Nehim a smug, I-told-you-so look, but he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and ignored him.

That was the problem. There would be no time later, not if the enemy was already coming on board the ship. Nehim had been hungering for one of the half-naked bitches for a week, and in all likelihood the hijacked liner was going to be blown to bits within the next few minutes. Damn Khalid, and damn the sanctimonious Saudi ulema who'd put him here!

He was going to have one of these bitches before he died, no matter what Hijazi or Aziz or the Amir himself might say.

The question was, which one?

"Face the front of the theater," Rubens said, looking closely at the schematic showing the Neptune Theater. Pinpoints of red light representing forty more passengers had just entered the room and were moving down toward the front.

"Okay," Dean's voice came back from an overhead speaker. The dots representing him and Walters were green. Both were carrying ID passkey cards provided by Royal Sky Line before the mission. There were well over a hundred colored pinpoints already within the theater, a mingling of red and blue.

Not counting the blips representing Dean and Walters, there were eighty-eight green, people carrying crew-member IDs. Many of those would be terrorists, but most would be prisoners, crew members brought to the theater. Separating the two was going to be tough.

"We've identified five tangos surrounding your group," Rubens said, "the ones who brought you in. They're at twelve o'clock, two o'clock, five o'clock, six o'clock, and nine o'clock."

"Rog. Got 'em spotted."

"You have four shooters in the Deck Two balcony. Two o'clock, four o'clock, eight o'clock, and ten o'clock."

Again there was a pause. "Okay. I have them. And I saw two outside the Deck One doors. Any more?"

"There may be others mixed in with the prisoners. We can't differentiate here."

see one, yeah. One o'clock, thirty feet away. He's hassling a couple of women. Damn it… one of them is CJ! Our GCHQ contact!"

Rubens checked the indicated area. Two green blips overlapped, close beside several blues. "We see them."

"Ten targets. That'll take some shooting."

"Charlie, I recommend that you wait. The tangos who brought you down here will probably be leaving soon. And Brisard and three men are on their way on Deck Two. They'll be there in a few minutes."

"Rog. We'll wait." Almost a minute later, Dean spoke again. "Listen… that son of a bitch mixed in with the hostages. He's just grabbed a woman… no, two women! CJ and someone else! He's leading them up the other aisle!"

Ruben saw the dots, one blue, two green, moving closely together toward the door. "I see them."

"We need to take him now."

"You need to sit tight, Dean. Brisard's's almost there."

"Damn it, Bill!"

"By the book, Dean. By the book."

The three points of light moved through the door and into the passageway.

"They're gone," Dean said.

"You'll have your chance in a moment."

Brisard and the other three operators were nearly at the theater's Deck Two entrance