Sea Of Terror

Chapter 26

Dean and Walters walked all the way down the aisle, to a point where they could see all four of the terrorist shooters in the second-floor balcony The five who'd brought them here were all leaving, at the top of the aisle and filing through the doors.

"Brisard's at the door on the second deck," Rubens' voice warned.

"Right. Walters? Get ready!"

Together the two men reached behind their backs and drew their pistols, sitting down in theater seats on opposite sides of the aisle as they did so, keeping the weapons carefully hidden.

The theater was a gaudy, glitzy explosion of Baroque architecture, heavy on the gold paint and curlicues, filled with Nereids and dolphins, seashells and seahorses, nets and tridents. An enormous figure of Neptune — the Roman Poseidon, the god who'd supposedly founded Atlantis —: emerged from the bulkhead directly above the stage.

Their guards were leaning on the balcony railings, looking down into the auditorium, but they seemed to just be watching, not preparing to massacre the hostages. If any of them took aim, Dean was ready to pull out his weapon and begin firing, Brisard or no Brisard.

Dean was angry about the one tango he'd seen leaving the theater with two captives. For Dean, the horror of extremist Muslim fundamentalists wasn't their religion; so far as he was concerned, people could believe what they wanted. He knew that moderate Islamic clerics taught justice and equality, including equality for women, a fairly advanced concept for a Prophet born in the sixth century. The problem was that too many fundamentalists of all religions relied not on their scriptures but on local custom and belief… and then went through their holy books looking for isolated verses that would justify those beliefs. If your culture already believed that women were second-class citizens or worse, it wasn't hard to make the Qur'an support your prejudice.

As a result, there were Muslim societies where women were forbidden to go to school, where their genitals were mutilated, where rape victims were imprisoned and even killed, where a woman who didn't wear the veil was automatically responsible for whatever a Muslim male decided to do to her:

All in the name of Allah, the merciful, the all-knowing.

"Keep tracking those three," he murmured to Rubens.

"We are. Stand by. Brisard is coming in."

"Walters!" Dean snapped. "Ready…"

"We're at the infirmary," Yancey said. Behind him were five of the jumpers in a strung-out line. They'd ditched their oxygen bottles and masks but were still in their combat blacks. Their NVG monoculars were in place, their gain tuned down to allow for the ship's ambient lighting but still revealing the aim points for the IR laser sights.

"Copy that," Caravaggio replied. "We have you on the board. The passageway is clear ahead of you, all the way through the galley. You have one green light standing next to the far door inside the galley, probably a tango guard, and ten more in small groups left and right — probably galley staff."

"Roger that." They would have to sort tangos from crew members when they went in.

Hiding there behind the bar up in the casino had been one of the toughest things David P. Yancey had ever done — and he'd been through SEAL training and Hell Week, through a deployment in Afghanistan and two tours in Iraq, none of it exactly easy duty. Crouching there in silence, looking up with weapons ready to open fire if they were discovered or if the tangos started slaughtering hostages, they'd waited out the confrontation in the casino, emerging only after one of the elderly women — a Ms. Caruthers — had called out "Ally ally outs in free!"

There were ten of them, now, with Walters and Dean on their way forward with the terrorists. After briefly consulting with the Art Room, Tom Brisard had taken three of the men and headed forward, intent on following Dean and Walters to wherever the hostages were being led. Yancey took the remaining five and, guided by Caravaggio back in the Art Room, found a service stairwell that would take them all the way down to A Deck.

They emerged in a passageway outside the ship's infirmary. Several civilians, including two of the ship's doctors, clustered around them. "Are you here to rescue us?" one, an older woman, asked.

"We're going to try, ma'am," Yancey had replied. "All of you stay here and stay down!"

"Dr. Barnes! Have you seen him? The terrorists took him… "

"We'll take care of it, ma'am." Brushing aside other questions, they'd moved aft down the central passageway leading from the infirmary to the massive watertight door leading to the galley.

Coulter and Yancey took the lead, since both of them had suppressed H&Ks, while Boone and Michelson carried combat shotguns, and Daniels and O'Brien had assault rifles. He took a stance, weapon braced against his shoulder, and said, "Go!" Daniels swiped an ID card through the reader, and Michelson pushed the door open.

Beyond was the gleaming expanse of the galley for the Atlantia Restaurant, one deck above. At the far end of the room, a lone man in a khaki uniform and holding an AK slouched in a chair, looking bored. Both Coulter and Yancey opened up with sharp, precise three-round bursts, their fire guided by the infrared dots visible through their monoculars. The man sprawled backward, arms flying to either side and weapon clattering to the deck as he slammed against the door at his back, then spilled from the overturning chair and sprawled in front of it in an untidy heap.

"One tango down," Yancey said as the six Black Cats rolled through the open door in swift succession, keeping their weapons up. Cooks, stewards, and galley assistants stood to either side, some screaming, some taking cover behind tables and food prep stations.

"Stay down!" Coulter barked. "Everybody down! Hands on your heads!"

There was no time to check for terrorists mixed in with crew members; Yancey saw no obvious tangos anywhere else in the galley, but that didn't mean they weren't there. So long as he saw no weapons, however, he kept moving forward, H&K at his shoulder, making for the far door.

"There… there are terrorists in there!" one young woman called out.

"We have four tangos inside the after hold," Caravaggio said over his radio headset. "All together, all toward your right as you go in, at roughly two o'clock."

"Stay down! Nobody move!" O'Brien called out, moving backward across the galley as he brought up the rear. Yancey and Coulter both dropped their half-empty magazines and popped in fresh ones, took stances in front of the door, and waited for Boone, Michelson, and Daniels to get into position between and behind them. "Go!"

The door to the aft hold opened, and Yancey stepped through, immediately pivoting to keep his weapon and its dancing IR spot aimed toward the four tangos inside. From the door, however, all he could see was an enormous stack of massive crates and cardboard boxes, bank upon bank of refrigerators, steel shelves, and piles of canned goods and boxed food.

"They heard you," Caravaggio warned. "Two targets, moving toward you and toward your right."

The trouble was, Yancey knew, that back in the Art Room they were looking at nice, clean deck schematics and they couldn't see the mountains of supplies that were providing cover at the moment for four jihadist tangos. It was comforting knowing how many tangos they faced and what their general direction was, but that didn't make getting at them very much easier.

"Boone! With me!" Yancey started forward, following the main open pathway leading aft from the door.

"Rest of you with me!" Coulter added. He broke to the right and started climbing a pile of wooden crates fifteen feet high.

"Watch out for hot tubs," Yancey said, grinning. Coulter's jumpsuit was still sopping wet from his accidental immersion in a spa on the Atlas Pool deck.

"Yancey!" Caravaggio said, her voice urgent. "Two tangos right in front ofyou\ Range ten feet!"

What was right in front of him was a line of refrigerators forming the right-hand wall of the passageway he and Boone were following. It looked like there was a cross-passage just ahead, however. Gun still tight against his shoulder, Yancey broke into a run.

Swinging around the corner of the last refrigerator, he came face-to-face with two bearded men, khaki-clad, both holding AKs at port arms. Reflexively his finger tapped the trigger before his brain had fully processed what he was seeing; a three-round burst of 9 mm bullets slashed into the face and throat of the closest man, spinning him roughly aside.

An instant behind Yancey's burst, Boone opened up with his AA-12, the combat shotgun set on full auto. With a fire rate of three hundred rounds per minute, the weapon loosed a thundering barrage of four blasts in less than a second, the 12-gauge shot ripping into both terrorists and cutting them apart. Blood splashed across the refrigerator, stacks of crates, and the deck.

"Two more down!" Yancey called, stepping across one of the bodies. Ahead he could now see the inside of the main outer doors to the cargo hold. Fifty feet to the right of those were three trucks, with enclosed cargo decks and open tailgates.

But he couldn't see the other two tangos.

A door opened on the second-level balcony in the back of the theater. There were two tangos back there, one to the left, one to the right, and they both turned at the sound.

Dean lifted his SIG Sauer, dropping into a kneeling crouch and bracing the weapon in a two-handed stance, aiming at the gunman on the right-side balcony forward. The man had also heard the door and was turning to face it, raising his AK.

The range was a good fifty feet from the front-row seats to the front balcony one level up, a long shot for a pistol. Long hours on the practice range, however, had let Dean qualify as an expert, both with his beloved accurized M1911A1 and with the SIG Sauer P226. Releasing his pent-up breath halfway, he squeezed with his whole hand.

The shot came as a surprise, as it should in careful marksmanship. The terrorist lurched to one side, twisting, as the AK in his hands went off, the muzzle flash long and stuttering in the theater's dim light.

People in the theater screamed, some bolting in panic, others trying to duck down among the rows of seats. Dean reacquired and fired again, and the terrorist dropped out of sight behind the balcony railing.

At Dean's back, Walters fired again and again as his target jackknifed over the railing, then dropped twenty feet to the deck. Brisard and his people were moving down the balcony aisles at the same moment, firing at the two terrorist gunmen there. Dean pivoted, ready to add his fire to theirs, but both tangos were already dropping.

The back doors to Deck One swung open, however, and two more terrorists rushed in — the guards who'd been standing outside, obviously brought in by the burst of AK fire. Dean dropped his aim and fired twice at one, then pivoted to aim at the other… but held his fire. Panicking civilians were everywhere, scattering as one of the newly arrived terrorists opened fire with his AK.

"Get down! Everybody down!" Dean yelled.

One young man stood up, shirtless, waving his arms.

Omar Mohammed Ra'd heard the echoing thud-thud-thud-thud of a heavy weapon close by and leaped toward the trucks.

Aram and Fahaj had left moments before to investigate the opening of the door to the galley. No one was supposed to come through that door unless word came from the Amir himself that it was okay. In retrospect, it might have been better for the men guarding the trucks in the hold to have stayed in place, concealed and ready to open fire on any intruders… but the four of them had not been chosen for their combat experience or their tactical expertise.

Ra'd was the oldest of them, and he was just nineteen. He was Egyptian, the son of a poverty-crippled family in a suburb of Cairo. He'd joined the revived Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a militant Egyptian group that had united with al-Qaeda in 2006. From a training camp in Egypt he'd been sent to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, where he'd first met Amir Rahid Sayed as-Saadi and transferred to the Islamic Jihad International Brigade.

Ra'd and the three with him had been chosen, as-Saadi told them, because of their faith.

And Ra'd was dedicated to the way of submission, to Allah and Islam and the word of the Prophet. Ra'd had welcomed the opportunity offered by the Amir to guard the trucks and their tons of high explosives and to detonate those explosives if at any time the enemies of Islam tried to take them. The four of them had been warned not to wander too close to the trucks, that there was a deadly poison inside the trucks on top of the explosives, but if enemy forces tried to break into the ship's hold, they were to detonate the explosives immediately.

The detonator lay on a small folding table set up next to one of the trucks, at the end of a long, black coil of rubber-sheathed cable. A car battery rested in the deck beneath, connected with a tangle of electrical cables leading into each vehicle. All he needed to do was turn the arming key on the detonator and press the red button.

Behind him, Said Shalabi snatched up his rifle. "Go, Omar! Go, and I will cover you!" To his left, Aram and Fajah tumbled across the deck in an explosion of wet scarlet, as two ominous figures in black rounded a line of refrigerators holding foodstuffs for the galley.

One of the figures shouted something… but Ra'd spoke no language but Arabic — specifically the Egyptian dialect. He'd had trouble understanding his brothers from Syria and Morocco.

The thunder sounded again, and something shrieked off the bulkhead behind him. Heart pounding, he snatched up the detonator and turned the key…

"Everybody get down!" the shirtless man screamed, and then a burst of AK-47 fire tore through his body, knocking him over the back of a theater seat. As he fell, Dean had a clear shot at the shooter and took it, firing three rounds into the gunman in rapid succession as Walters opened fire as well. The gunman collapsed, and Dean swung, aiming his weapon across the crowd. It was still possible that there were other terrorists here on the main floor, sheltering among the hostages.

And there he was, bolting for the door at the top of the aisle, one remaining gunman.

Screaming people continued to clog the aisle, blocking Dean's shot, and the man was underneath the back balcony now, out of the sight of Brisard and the others. The terrorist knocked several people over; a young woman panicked and ran, and the gunman spun, raising his AK. An older man leaped and knocked the woman flat but was hit himself by a burst of full-auto fire as the gunman emptied his AK into the shrieking mob. Then he spun and vanished out the door just as Walters fired twice, the bullets slamming into the closing door behind the fleeing hijacker, spraying splinters.

David Yancey heard the yammer of an AK. Bullets screamed off the refrigerator, and he felt a hammer's blow against his right side, slamming him to the left. Boone opened up with his AA-12, the first rounds going high. Staggering with the slam to his side, Yancey kept tracking the figure by the truck, loosing a three-round burst from his H&K, then another, then a third.

The gunman with an AK off to the right was continuing to fire and Yancey was hit again, but the man by the trucks collapsed as Yancey and Boone both kept firing.

Yancey dropped to his knees; he wasn't in pain, exactly, but he was having trouble breathing. Boone shifted his aim and brought down the other gunman as Coulter and the others climbing up onto the crates reached an overlook and joined in as well. Caught by 12-gauge shotgun blasts, 9mm, and 5.56 rounds from several directions, the gunman crumpled in a heap on the deck.

"We've got one runner," Dean called as the fleeing gunman banged out the theater door just ahead of Walters' shots. "First Deck, heading aft!"

"Let him go," Rubens said.

"Clear here!" Brisard called from the balcony. His men were checking the bodies, making sure the three tangos up there all were dead.

"And clear here!" Walters called. He'd moved over to the left side of the theater and was checking the body of the man who'd fallen.

"Five tangos down, theater," Dean added. "We have at least two civilian casualties. No… make that three… correction… four." Several people had been hit by the indiscriminate spray of AK fire from the top of the aisle.

"One of you stay with the civilians," Rubens said. "Help the wounded and keep the rest quiet. The rest need to head for the bridge."

Dean moved up the aisle to the wounded man, easing him down off the seats and onto his back on the floor. He was wearing swim trunks. He had a savage gunshot wound in his stomach, hidden by fast-welling blood, and a second wound higher up, in the right side of his chest, bubbling as he tried to breathe. Dean, the ex-Marine, had seen enough combat wounds in the field to recognize a sucking chest wound.

"I've got him," an older man said, kneeling at Dean's side. "I'm the ship's doctor." The man had his shirt off and was pressing it against the bloody abdominal wound. "Cigarettes!" he yelled. "Anyone here have cellophane cigarette wrappers?"

Several men and women offered the wrappers from their cigarettes. The doctor accepted two and slapped them over the bubbling holes, entry wound and exit wound, in the man's chest and back.

"Listen…," the wounded man said. His voice was weak, and it sounded like he was gargling. "Those two women… He took them… "

"We saw," Dean told him. "We'll get them!"

"Sharon Reilly. Janet Carroll. Please, please… help them… "

"We'll do our best."

Coulter jumped down off the wall of boxes and jogged toward the truck. The terrorist with the firing switch lay in a fetal curl in a spreading pool of blood; emotionlessly Coulter put another 9mm slug into the man's skull, just to make sure. "This one's dead!"

"Four tangos down!" Boone called. "Team member down!"

"I'm okay," David Yancey said, rising unsteadily. He reached up under his harness, probing the heavy weave of his Kevlar combat vest, then pulled a slightly flattened 7.62 slug from the weave. "Gonna have a bruise or two, though"

"Stay put. We'll check the trucks."

He lurched to his feet, still clutching his side. "Fuck that. I'm with you."

Daniels was scrambling down off the crates. He was waving a handheld Geiger qounter in front of him. "It's hot!"

"We're copying the radiation readings here," Rubens' voice said. "Our advisor with the AEC says one man at a time, no more than fifteen minutes' total exposure for any of you. Understand?"

"Roger that," Yancey said. "Coulter! Get away from there! All of you guys, clear out. Set up a defensive position on the other side of the galley door."

Unsteadily he approached the trucks, looking for signs that the explosives were booby-trapped.

While the Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Iraq had acquired a reputation as bad boys with improvised explosive devices — IEDs — their best was rarely very sophisticated. They were proficient at planting mines that could be set off remotely, from a distance, or with trip wires, and they'd been known to pull cute tricks like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and leaving it beneath a dead or injured man, the firing lever compressed and held in place by the weight of the body Elaborate booby traps involving choices between multiple colored wires and which order to cut them in were generally the provenance of Hollywood… and usually bad Hollywood at that.

Yancey had gone through quite a bit of training with the SEALs, in both the creation and the disarming of improvised explosives. He'd also trained for a time with the Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal people, the EOD. He approached the trucks carefully, tracing the electrical wiring by eye. There was the battery, beneath the table, a pair of wires leading up and into the back of the truck. Yanking those wires ought to be all that was needed to safe the bomb.

Ought to be. You didn't make it in the SEALs or the EOD without acquiring a bit of paranoia. He knew radiation was burning him — he couldn't feel it, but it was burning him nonetheless. Every instinct he possessed told him to yank those battery cables and get the hell out of there.

But he followed the two battery wires up onto the back of the nearest truck. The flatbed was piled high with nondescript cardboard boxes, each one holding block upon block upon plastic-wrapped block of C-4 explosives. One of the battery leads was connected to a larger cable, and that ran back through loop after loop to the firing box in the dead tango's hand. A second lead emerged from the firing-box cable and was connected to a solid-pack electrical detonator embedded in a block of C-4. Another wire connected the battery directly with the detonator. So far, so good. Arm the firing box by turning a key, press the red button, the circuit completed, the blasting cap went off, and with it went several tons of plastic explosives.

But a part of the wire directly connecting the battery with the blasting cap was hidden under a large box of C-4. He was reaching for the wire to pull it out when he stopped. In this line of work, paranoia was good.

Shaking his head, he backed off. Returning to the battery on the deck outside, he unscrewed the caps and removed the wires. The blasting cap ought to be harmless, now, its connection to the battery gone.

But he still didn't trust it.

He switched on his radio. "Art Room! This is Cougar Six!"

"Go ahead, David," Rubens' voice replied. "What've you got?"

"It's definitely rigged as an IND," he said. The acronym stood for "Improvised Nuclear Device" and referred to radiological material designed to be spread by a conventional explosion. Quickly Yancey described what he could see of the circuitry and told them what he'd done. "But I don't trust it," he said. "Part of the battery lead is hidden, and I can't get at it. Not without lifting a stack of cardboard boxes as tall as I am."

"Go ahead and get out of there, David," Rubens told him. "The SAS assault lifted off from the Ark Royal twenty minutes ago, and we have more helos inbound from the Eisenhower They should be there in another ten. We have a NEST on the way with the American helicopters."

"NEST" stood for "Nuclear Emergency Support Team," the unit under the jurisdiction of the U. S. Department of Energy tasked with responding to all types of accidents and emergencies involving nuclear material, including bomb threats.

"Roger that," Yancey said. He felt exhausted. He wondered if he was already feeling the effects of the radiation.

Before he left, though, he took another look at the back of the truck. Odd. The boxes of explosives weren't stacked neatly and squarely. Maybe that was what had been tugging at his subconscious… the fact that several boxes were jammed in every which way, carelessly, and several were tipped up on one edge, leaving space beneath. Reaching into the back of the truck, he grabbed one of the tipped boxes and lifted it, dragging it aside.

A hand grenade had been placed underneath the box, its pin already pulled. Yancey saw the metal arming lever pop off, saw the grenade skitter across the flatbed, its three-second fuse already burning…