Sea of Terror (52 page)

But there were never any guarantees in this line of work, and the tangos were perfectly capable of pulling off an unexpected and last-second kick to the nuts.

There was nobody else in the room from which the two Japanese had emerged. Kevin Smith was injured, his ears bleeding from the grenade blast. He sat on the lower step of the ladder while the rest of the SEALs continued their climb.

The bridge was just ahead, and two decks up.

Cougar Twelve

Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen

Friday, 0543 hours EST

Khalid was ten feet below the port side bridge wing, swiftly descending the vertical ladder past Deck Eleven. Dean leaned over the railing and fired, but the ladder had safety hoops encircling it every few feet, and the bullets ricocheted into the night. An instant later, more bullets snapped in, these coming from somewhere aft. Dean looked up and saw the muzzle flashes--gunmen hidden on Deck Eleven, just in front of the ship's smokestack, which was just barely visible in the darkness.

Dean was fully illuminated by light spilling from the bridge behind him, a perfect target.

Khalid reached an open platform on Deck Ten; according to the plans he'd studied, there was a door there leading into Kleito's Temple.

A bullet struck Dean's vest, slamming him painfully back a step. In a second or two, Khalid would be back inside the ship, and if he discarded his passkey, it would be easy to lose him.

A bullet grazed Dean's left arm, a fierce burn; Dean vaulted the railing and fell. . . .

Cougar Six

Aft Cargo Hold, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0543 hours EST

David Yancey lay on his back, fighting back the pain. The bruise where the tango had hit Yancey's vest was throbbing, and he thought there might be a broken rib there. Kevlar vests were lifesavers, but they weren't perfect.

More serious were the wounds in his side and leg, where shrapnel from the grenade had missed the vest and punctured him. His fingertips came away wet with blood when he touched those spots.

Oh . . . and there remained the little matter of radiation from the opened MOX canisters in the trucks. He'd been here . . . how long? Ten minutes, maybe.

"How are you doing, David?" Rubens' voice said over his helmet radio.

"Okay, sir. Listen ... I think I have it doped out."

"David, you need to crawl away from those trucks. The farther you are from the MOX canisters, the better."

He tried to move, and gasped as the pain hit him. He shook his head, trying to clear it. "Listen . . . don't want to pass out. They have those crates of C-4 just tumbled inside the trucks every which way, y'know?"

"The EOD and NEST people will be there soon. They'll take care of it."

"That grenade popped out from under a box. I think they have a lot of grenades inside all three trucks, sir. It would be a simple way to booby-trap them ... put eight or ten grenades under those boxes and between boxes and tucked in everywhere, all of them with the pins pulled. . .."

"The EOD people will take care of it, son. You just try to get away from those trucks."

"The thing I can't figure is ... I can feel the ship rolling a little right now, the deck moving under my back. If the weather got rough, like it was the other night, some of those boxes could shift. All it would take would be one armed hand grenade to set off all the grenades, all the blasting caps . . . and the whole mountain of C-4 would go up"

Chapter 28

Cougar Twelve, Dean Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen Thirty miles south of Nantucket Friday, 0543 hours EST

dean plummeted through the night, feetfirst, his H&K in his right hand, his left outstretched for balance and to grab at Khalid if he missed.

He almost missed, coming down immediately behind the Saudi terrorist, grabbing as he fell, crashing against the man and slamming both of them sideways against a railing. White pain shot up Dean's leg with the impact. The H&K went spinning into the night. Khalid snarled and twisted and tried to turn, bringing his AK up; Dean slammed the heel of his palm against Khalid's nose, slammed it as hard as he could, and felt cartilage snap with the blow.

Khalid yelped and tried to pull away. Dean held tight with one arm and slammed Khalid's face and jaw again and again until the terrorist finally managed to hit Dean hard in the chest with the muzzle of his AK and break free.

Dean felt the pain screaming up from his left ankle; he must have broken it in the fall. Khalid took an unsteady couple of steps backward, his face a mask of blood, his teeth showing bright through the blood as he raised his AK-47.

The gunshot was startling and unexpected....

SEAL VBSS Force Cold Steel Pacific Sandpiper Friday, 0544 hours EST

Kellerman signaled to Podesta and Vance, counting down the seconds, three ... two ... one ... got Jakowski tossed a flash-bang in through the open door, and Podesta and Vance rolled through into the darkened room filled with smoke and screaming. Kellerman and Jakowski were next, with Herrera bringing up the rear.

Sound-suppressed gunfire snapped and hissed. A tango at the helm crumpled and collapsed; another lying on the deck, covering his ears, jumped and twisted and lay still; a third fired blindly with his AK, spraying high until two 9mm rounds punctured his skull. Two more tried to run out onto the port side wing of the bridge and were cut down at the door.

"Cold Steel!" Kellerman called over the combat channel. "Bridge clear! Bridge secure!"

Herrera was at the ship's wheel, his eyes startlingly wide against the blacking on his face. "Madre de Dios!"

Kellerman followed the other SEAL'S stare ahead, across the ship's forward deck to the black water beyond. The Adantis Queen was there, looming huge out of the predawn darkness, lights aglow at her bridge.

And the Pacific Sandpiper was headed straight toward her at twenty knots.

Cougar Twelve, Dean Deck Ten, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0544 hours EST

Dean flinched as the first shot rang out. The smile on Khalid's bloodied face froze, then melted as the terrorist leader took a step to the side, half-turning. The man standing in the doorway to Kleito's Temple fired his handgun once again, and Khalid collapsed to the deck.

The man emerging from the bar was wearing a Royal Sky Line security uniform. Tucking the pistol into his waistband, he stooped to help Dean.

"Thanks," Dean murmured. Reaction was setting in, adrenaline thundering through his body, and he was starting to shake.

"No," Mohamed Ghailiani told him. "Thank you.

Deck Five, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0545 hours EST

Yaqub Nehim had been looking for one of the empty staterooms, a place to hide with his two personal hostages until the enemy came for him or the ship was blown to bits. He'd bound both women's wrists at their backs with plastic zip strips and herded them along the passageways with his Russian-made Makarov pistol. There were a number of empty staterooms here, and if the explosives in the hold didn't explode, it would be hours before anyone found the three of them. Plenty of time . ..

On Deck Four, he'd discovered that his key card no longer worked. None of the doors he'd tried would open.

Something, he knew, was going seriously wrong. For several minutes the radio on his belt had sounded with several sharp calls in Arabic, and once he'd heard the chatter of an automatic weapon. On Deck Five he'd met Ra'id Hijazi, panting and wild-eyed, who'd confirmed that enemy commandos had killed all of the fedayeen brothers in the theater moments after Nehim had left with his captives, that only he had managed to escape.

Nehim's thoughts of venting his lust on the two women melted instantly. "What should we do?" he cried. A new thought struck him. "We should kill these two!"

"No!" Hijazi said. "There are hostages in the gambling place, old people, many of them. We will take these two, gather up the other hostages, and wait. We can use them to bargain for time."

Hijazi's sanctimonious quoting of the Qur'an had always irritated Nehim. "What happened to dying the martyr's death?"

"The plan is wrecked. We will never reach New York. But the ship may yet explode at any moment. We need time.

"The children in the hold must be dead by now."

Hijazi gave him a measuring look. "Yesterday, at the Amir's orders, Aziz, Al-Shafi, Haqqani, and I went down to the hold. We . . . arranged things so that the explosives will detonate easily. Very easily."

"How?"

"Never mind. But if the enemy commandos attempt to tamper with the crates on the trucks, if this ship runs aground, if we hit anything or anything hits us, believe me. The trucks will blow!"

"Perhaps one of the lifeboats . . Nehim was thinking furiously. He could take one of the women as hostage, lower a boat--

"Fool!" Hijazi snarled. "In minutes these waters will be filled with enemy ships, the sky filled with their helicopters! No, if we hold many hostages at gunpoint, they will try to negotiate. We can kill a few at a time, to prove we mean business, to keep them from attacking. And while they negotiate, their people will attempt to dismantle the explosives in the truck."

"And we shall die."

"Martyrs' deaths, Yaqub." He gestured at the two disheveled women glaring at them from a few feet away. "We will find better than them in Paradise!"

Nehim had serious doubts about the Prophet's description of what awaited true believers in Paradise, but Hijazi's plan offered at least the possibility of escape. They were in the middle of an empty ocean. There was no chance that the cruise ship would run aground out here, or that anything would hit them.

He might survive yet.

SEAL VBSS Force Cold Steel Pacific Sandpiper Friday, 0545 hours EST

"Podesta!" Kellerman barked. "We need to turn now!"

QM1 John Podesta took the ship's wheel, spinning it hard to the right. "We won't stop in time," he said. "But the Queen is moving forward. Maybe we can miss her by passing astern!"

Kellerman hesitated, his hands above the two throttle levers, one for each of the Sandpiper's screws. His instinct was to throw the ship into reverse, to try to stop the leviathan before it collided with the ship now just five hundred yards ahead.

But with the rudder hard right, with the bow now slowly swinging to the right, toward the other ship's stern, throwing the screws in reverse would actually act against the turn. He remembered reading about some confusion on the bridge when the Titanic had spotted the iceberg, about how an attempt to turn away from the ice had actually swung the bow of the doomed ship toward it.

"That one," Podesta said, pointing at one of the side-by-side levers. "All back! The other one, full ahead!" In the old days, these levers would have been engine telegraphs, telling the crew in the engine room what to do. Nowadays the throttles were handled directly from the bridge-7-a good thing, since Kellerman hadn't yet heard the word from the lieutenant that the engine room was secure.

"Why aren't we turning?" Kellerman asked after a moment. The Atlantis Queen still loomed enormous just ahead.

"You don't turn these things on a dime, Chief," Podesta replied. "Or stop 'em on one, either. What the hell?"

Podesta was standing on tiptoes, looking down at the forward deck immediately ahead of the deckhouse. In the darkness, a half-dozen men were running forward, some clambering into the helicopter parked midway down the deck, others unfastening the lines securing the aircraft to the deck.

"This is Cold Steel Two," Kellerman called. Grabbing his H&K, he jogged for the port side bridge wing. "We have tangos on the forward deck! Looks like they're making for the helo!"

"It'll take 'em an hour to get that thing ready to fly," Vance told him.

As Kellerman left the enclosure of the bridge, he heard the shrill, rising whine of the helicopter's engine, saw the main rotor begin to turn. Two more tangos were running from the deckhouse as others climbed aboard. He shouldered his weapon and began firing. One of the hijackers fell. Another was hauled through the open doorway by a friend already on board.

The bastards had had the aircraft warmed up and ready.

The question was where they would go. The SEAL unit's pre-mission briefing had mentioned the helicopter, pointing out that by now it was probably so low on fuel it would be useless. Land lay forty miles to the north. They might make it. . . but would find themselves immediately surrounded by the authorities.

What the hell were they trying to do?

"Cold Steel, Cold Steel," Rubens' voice said over Kellerman's radio. "Take that helo down! Now!"

"Yes, sir!" He switched his H&K selector switch to full auto, raised the weapon, and began firing. With the integral suppressor, the H&K made little sound against the rising thunder of the helicopter's main rotor.

Jakowski was joining in from the opposite bridge wing, but the 9mm rounds had little punch to them. With an unsteady lurch, the helicopter lifted from the forward deck, its rotor arc barely clearing the traveling bridge gantry forward.

Kellerman kept firing until his magazine ran dry. He dropped the empty, slapped home a fresh magazine, chambered a round, and began firing again. By now, though, the helicopter was turning away, and Kellerman felt a cold chill of realization.

That helicopter wasn't headed for the mainland.

It was dropping low, low over the black water, nose down and accelerating as it headed straight for the cruise ship ahead.

Pyramid Club Casino, Atlantis Queen

Friday, 0545 hours EST

Yaqub Nehim shoved one of the women hard ahead, sending her sprawling onto the floor as they entered the casino. "Nobody move!" he screamed, holding the other woman close against his chest, the Makarov pressed up against the side of her head.

"Move to the back of the room!" Hijazi added, gesturing with his AK. "Quickly! Quickly!"

The old people did as they were told. "I hope you assholes know you're both going to die," one old woman said.

"And you will die with us, crone," Hijazi said. He strode closer to the crowd. "But if you all do exactly what we tell you, you might live a little longer!"

Nehim was feeling more confident now, more in control. They had twenty hostages here, all of them old people or women. The enemy commandos wouldn't dare attack them now.