Sea of Terror (47 page)

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.

44Please, 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.

Security Office, Atlantis Queen 40deg 45' N, 70deg 07' W Friday, 0520 hours EST

"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.

Cougar Twelve 40deg 45' N, 70deg 07' W Friday, 0522 hours EST

"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."

Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland Friday, 0524 hours EST

"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
e.g.
where they most needed one.

Cougar Twelve

Pyramid Club Casino, Atlantis Queen

Friday, 0524 hours EST

"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."