Sea of Terror (20 page)

He lowered his binoculars, thoughtful. Possibly they'd ripped up the stanchions and railing in order to facilitate bringing injured people on board. Or maybe that helicopter had caused the damage. Landing a helicopter on a ship at sea was tricky business at best. That helicopter was a civilian aircraft--he could tell that from the markings-- and the pilot might simply not have the experience necessary to touch down on a moving deck without clipping a railing with his landing gear, say.

There were other questions, too. The plutonium ship's gun ports had been opened; he could see two of the guns exposed, one over the fantail, the other at the starboard-forward corner of the bridge house. Was that standard procedure for armed PNTL ships during rescue efforts? Phillips didn't know.

And why were they steadily cruising away from the disaster area? Were they that certain they'd rescued everybody in the water? Phillips knew from experience just how big the ocean actually was, when there were men in the water after the sinking of a ship. Typically, SAR efforts continued for hours, even days, after a ship went down, until the rescuers were absolutely certain that every survivor had been recovered.

As Phillips watched, however, and as the Queen drew closer, he could see a number of crewmen on the Sandpiper's decks. Several of them were waving as they waited to take lines aboard from the Queen.

"Pass the word for line-handling parties to stand by, port side," he said.

"Aye, aye, sir." Vandergrift began speaking into a handset.

"Sparks! Tell the Sandpiper to come to a full stop. This is going to be tough enough without them charging across the ocean at five knots."

Phillips turned from the forward windows and walked to the starboard wing, using the, binoculars to look at the smoke plume still rising from the sea. The fire appeared to be dying out, though thick smoke continued feeding the black, roiling column ascending into the sky. At this distance, it was impossible to see if there were any people still in the water, but he could make out a lot of debris on the surface.

Damn it, there could easily be survivors there still, clinging to wreckage or buoyed on life jackets. He intended to have a long talk with the Sandpiper's skipper in a few moments. There was no reason for the transport ship to leave the scene and every reason for her to stay.

"Captain?" the radio operator called. "Got something funny here."

He walked away from the bridge wing to the radio shack door. Inside, three operators sat at a bank of consoles. "What do you have?"

"We have a frequency scanner going, to keep track of local traffic, right? It just jumped to a military frequency. I think it's a military radio."

"What did they say?"

"I don't know, sir. It wasn't in English."

"French?"

"No, sir. This was ... not sure. Kind of guttural? Sounded like 'hellick.'"

" 'Hellick'? Just that?"

"Yes, sir. Repeated three times, 'hellick, hellick, hellick,' like that. .. and then there was a pause, maybe a few seconds, and it repeated three more times."

"Maybe the Germans have a ship in the area."

"Maybe, sir." The radio operator didn't sound convinced.

" 'Hallig' is the name of a German island in the North Sea," one of the other operators suggested.

"You speak German?"

"Yes, sir."

"Keep listening, then." But the North Sea was a long way from here. It didn't make sense. Perhaps Hallig was the name of a German ship?

"Captain!" came over the bridge intercom system.

Phillips picked up the intercom handset. "This is the captain."

"Sir! This is Carter, Security Department. We may have a situation, here."

"What kind of a situation?"

"We're picking up crewmen on our security cams.

They're moving--"

"Damn it, Carter, of course they're moving! I just gave orders to stand by to pass lines to that other ship!"

"No, sir! Not that! We have ... looks like eight or ten men coming up the passageway toward Security. They ... my God!"

"What? What is it?"

"Captain! They're armed\ Automatic rifles! Eight of them outside Security! Eight more on their way to the bridge! I don't know how they got past the secure doors, but--"

Carter's voice cut off, and Phillips heard a loud, hammering sound, followed a moment later by the unmistakable flat and chattering crack of automatic fire.

"Seal all security doors!" Phillips snapped, and Kelly, the security man assigned to the bridge, moved to comply.

And then the aft door to the bridge banged open, and men were storming in, some with semiautomatic handguns, some with assault rifles. "Get away from the console!" one of the intruders barked.

Kelly continued to type on a console keyboard, entering his password, and the leader of the attackers raised his pistol with a long sound suppressor screwed onto the muzzle and fired once ... a sharp, hissing exclamation. Kelly jerked, back arching away from the shots, then collapsed on the deck, leaving a smear of blood on the console.

The leader of the attackers wore the dark blue uniform and badge of the Atlantis Queen's Security Department. Turning, he leveled the pistol at Phillips' head.

"Captain," the man said calmly, "I am Yusef Khalid of the Islamic Jihad International Brigade of al-Qaeda. Your ship now belongs to us! All of you, down on the deck! I will shoot anyone who disobeys, or who doesn't carry out my orders instantly!"

Automatic gunfire barked from the radio room, and Phillips heard a man scream.

Chapter 11

Lost Continent Restaurant, Atlantis Queen North Atlantic Ocean 49deg 21' N, 8deg 13' W Saturday, 1018 hours GMT

donald myers looked up from the menu as Ms. Caruthers and Ms. Jordan hurried up to join them. Myers and the rest of the tour group were already seated at the large table along the port side windows, looking down on the merchant vessel close alongside.

The Lost Continent Restaurant was the second-largest dining area on the Atlantis Queen, luxuriously furnished and appointed, with large windows, crystal chandeliers, imitation Mayan walls and columns, and a small rain forest's worth of potted trees and vines giving the place the romantic atmosphere of a fantasy-adventure novel. It was located on the Tenth Deck, aft, overlooking the Atlas Pool on the Deck Nine fantail and, at the moment, offering an unparalleled view of the Queen's docking with the other ship.

The group had decided to come here when the announcement had sounded over the PA system perhaps forty-five minutes ago, planning on having some breakfast while watching the drama unfold outside. A good way to keep the women out of the way of the rescue, Myers thought. Lots of other passengers evidently had thought the same, that it would let them watch without getting stepped on. The Lost Continent was crowded with people. They'd been lucky to get here early enough to beat the rush and get seats.

"Oh, good," Ms. Jones said. "Elsie! Anne! You're just in time! They're starting to toss ropes across to the other ship!"

"It's all so perfectly excitingl" Ms. Dunne added.

"Never mind that," Ms. Caruthers said. "Donald! There's something wrong aboard this ship!"

Myers sighed, looking up. Both of the women appeared slightly flushed, perhaps a bit out of breath. "Such as what, Ms. Caruthers?" he asked.

"Elsie and I were just coming out of our cabin, up on the Hera Deck," Ms. Jordan said. "We were in a hurry because we wanted to come down and join you all for breakfast and--"

"I believe there are terrorists on board, Mr. Myers," Caruthers interrupted.

"Terrorists?" Myers said. He managed not to laugh out loud. Since they'd come aboard Thursday, he'd been playing with the thought he'd had about the women's terrorist and sewing circle and wishing he could share it with someone. Caruthers' blunt statement brought the humorous image back to mind.

"Terrorists," Caruthers said firmly as the two women sat down at the places left for them. "Men with guns!"

"Slow down, Elsie," Roger Galsworthy said. "What men with what guns?"

"There were three of them," Jordan said, "and they were coming down the hallway as we were leaving our stateroom, bold as you please, and one of them bumped against me and almost--"

"They were wearing ship's crew uniforms," Caruthers said, interrupting again. "And they were carrying machine guns!"

"Machine guns?" Abe Klein said, chuckling. "Seems a little unlikely."

"They were those Russian guns, like in that movie Russian Dawn back in the eighties," Ms. Jordan said. "Where a bunch of high school kids fight a Russian invasion of the U. S.?"

"I think you mean Red Dawn, Anne," Caruthers said.

"Red Dawn, that's right. The rifles were this long," Jordan continued, holding her hands apart, "and black, except for orange wood underneath the barrel, and back on the stock. And the . . . the thing where they keep the bullets? It was this long and curved. And one of the men said something to the others when the one bumped into me, and another looked like he was going to hit me, but another one snapped at him and they just kept on going."

"What did they say?" Myers asked.

"I don't know," Caruthers said. "It wasn't English or French."

"It sounded foreign" Jordan added.

Myers frowned. "Foreign languages often do."

"One of them," Jordan continued, "the one who'd snapped at the other one, just kind of looked at us and said, 'Ship's Security, go back to your stateroom.' And they kept on going down the hall. Running, almost."

"So what did you do?" Ms, Dunne asked.

"Came right down here to find you, of course," Caruthers said. Her mouth was set in a hard-lined expression of disapproval.

"Look . .. you said they were wearing crew uniforms?" Myers asked.

"That's right," Caruthers said. "White slacks, dark blue shirts, ship's logo on the left chest, where a shirt pocket would be if it had one. But they had dark skin. Not like coloreds, but dark, Mediterranean-looking. And they all had beards. Have you seen anyone in the Atlantis Queen's crew with beards?"

"Yes, actually," Myers said, trying to ignore the unpleasantly racist comment. Caruthers was old and had grown up in the South of the 1940s. "Some of the line handlers when we left the dock yesterday had beards."

"I am not crazy, young man," Caruthers told him. "I know what we saw!"

"I'm sure you do." Myers was continually bemused by Anne Jordan's taste in movies. Schwarznegger action films ... and now Red Dawn. Her description of the rifle, though, sounded very much like an AK-47, or something just like it--an AKM, perhaps. Orange stock and fore-grip, banana clip magazine ... not a machine gun, but an assault rifle, certainly.

"We need to tell the captain!" Caruthers said.

"Ms. Caruthers, I'm sure you saw what you say you did. But I feel very sure that there's a logical explanation."

"Such as?" Caruthers said, staring him in the eye and lifting her chin. "In my world people don't run around with guns, bumping into decent people and talking in foreign languages!"

"These people," Myers said carefully, "take security very seriously on this ship. You all saw that at the security checkpoint the other day, right?"

"Up to a point," Caruthers said. She almost smiled at the memory.

Myers was still embarrassed about that scene. In the end, the security guards had settled for using a handheld metal detector to check Caruthers and the others who'd refused to submit to the X-ray scan head to toe, then waved them on through. Caruthers clearly considered that to have been a victory for moral and upstanding people everywhere.

Myers pointed out the window. "We're coming alongside another ship. I would be willing to bet any money you like that if this ship has to get close to another ship, the rules say that armed security guards take up stations where they can keep an eye on things."

"Makes sense," Abe Klein said, nodding.

"Of course it does," Galsworthy added. "Us former-military types have seen this sort of thing before, right, Donald?"

"Uh, right. Yeah." Galsworthy, he remembered, was ex-Air Force from the Vietnam era, and made a lot of the fact when given half a chance.

The conversation wandered on, moving on to the fine points of twentieth-century piracy and the security systems in place on board the Atlantis Queen--key cards to keep unauthorized personnel out of secure areas, for instance, and scanners to make sure people weren't wandering off where they shouldn't. Bored, Myers turned away and watched the docking taking place outside. Crewmen--and many of them were bearded, he noted-- had tossed massive hawsers out and down to the far smaller ship alongside. Crewmen on the other ship had made the hawsers fast to cleats in the deck.

He could see the name of the other ship across her transom--Pacific Sandpiper She looked like an oil tanker, with her superstructure all the way aft behind a long, long forward deck, but she was a lot smaller than he would have expected for a tanker. He'd seen photos of ships like this one designed for carrying grain on the Great Lakes. Maybe that's what she was ... a grain ship.

A helicopter was circling both ships in the distance-- part of the rescue operation, no doubt.

Terrorists. He shook his head and, again, suppressed a laugh. The only terrorists on board were at this table.

Turkish Interpol National Central Bureau

Ataturk Bulvari

Ankara, Turkey

Saturday, 1235 hours GMT+ 2

"Lutfin, Komutanim!" Lia DeFrancesca said. "Please, sir! We really need your help on this!"

Colonel Tarhan looked up at Lia from behind his desk and rubbed at his luxuriant mustache with a nicotine-stained finger. "Well..

"Everywhere I go," she told him, "the bureaucracy stands in the way. And we must have this information before the British have to release the suspect."

"Yes, I can certainly understand that," Tarhan replied. He picked up the wire photo of Nayim Erbakan and studied it again. He glanced up at Lia. "You say you're with Interpol?"

"Zswropol, Komutanim," she replied. The Turkish honorific was reserved for a military superior officer, rather than a civilian. It emphasized, Lia hoped, the essential fraternity of military personnel, their bond of brotherhood, whatever their country of origin. "If I were Interpol," she added, "I wouldn't need to be here, jumping through the bureaucratic hoops.