by Steven Gould
I looked down at the map again. The SUMED pipeline ran from the Gulf of Suez at Ain Sukhna to the Mediterranean just west of Alexandria, bringing Arab oil from the Gulf countries to Western markets. Egypt had very little oil of its own, but at least it could make some revenue from its transfer, both through the pipeline and through the Suez Canal.
Off to the east of our route, where the Nile Delta gave way to the desert, I could see vegetation that was startlingly greener than the brown scrub below, a visible line that said, “The water stops here.” I tracked our progress by the secondary roads we crossed. Shortly after crossing Secondary Road 7 the desert turned to dunes and we headed due north, splitting away from the pipeline. Again we approached the edge of the Delta. On the horizon I began to see the ocean.
Alexandria grew, a long strip of city along the sea. It was backed by Lake Maryut so it almost looked an island from our approach; then we were cutting across a thin strip of land and running northeast, along the shore over petroleum docks, over the western harbor. Commercial traffic and ancient dhows spotted the inner harbor with cruise ships anchored or docked.
All of the cruise ships were too big to be the Argos.
Then we pulled over an even thinner strip of land and passed over an ancient, weathered fort.
“El Atta,” said George.
Only a little farther up the shore, on a small finger of land that protected the eastern harbor, another fort challenged the sea.
“Qait Bey.” George pointed, checking his watch. I looked at mine. Fifty-seven minutes since we’d lifted off in Cairo.
“Good job,” I told him, and he smiled.
He landed 250 yards from Qait Bey, at the helicopter landing pad at the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries. I dug his bonus out of my bag, five hundred dollars, and gave it to him. Then I hit the talk button and said, “Another five hundred for one short flight.”
“How long? I will need to refuel if it is very long.”
“Less than fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most.”
He nodded. “When? I cannot block their landing pad for very long.”
I looked around the landing pad, acquiring it as a jump site. “Ten minutes.”
The street was called Qasr Ras El Tin on the inset map I’d studied in the helicopter, but the street sign was in Arabic so I didn’t know for sure. There was an English sign for the fort. The porter wouldn’t take my admission fee in U.S. currency, so I jumped past him.
The press were easy to find, on the parapet, looking out to sea with binoculars and telephoto lenses. In the distance, a white ship with a blue smokestack was anchored a mile offshore.
Corseau, the Reuters reporter, was talking to an Egyptian Army officer. I waved at him and he broke off his conversation immediately and walked over to me, taking me by the elbow and leading me down the stairs away from the rest of the reporters.
“I talked to my office an hour ago. What took you so long to get here?”
I thought about telling him the truth, that I couldn’t jump someplace I hadn’t been. I didn’t want them to know my limits, though.
“Held up in traffic,” I said. “Astral plane all fucked up.” We were winding down a small staircase, hidden from view. I stopped him and said, “I’m going out there, but I need as much information as I can get. Hold still.”
I moved behind him and he said, “Wait—”
I jumped us to the helipad.
“—a minute!” I released him and he spun around, then steadied when he realized that he’d only come about a quarter of a mile. He exhaled a deep breath. I motioned him into the backseat of the helicopter. He took a headset hanging above his seat and put it on. His eyes were large, but he’d obviously been in helicopters before, reaching for the straps and buckling himself in.
I climbed in and pointed my thumb at the sky. By the time I’d my headset on and was buckled in, George had the blades up to speed and lifted off the pad.
When we could see the ocean I pointed at the distant yacht. “A big circle, around that boat, a couple of hundred feet above the water. Don’t get too close.”
George nodded.
“Can you hear me, Jean-Paul?” I looked over my shoulder.
He thumbed the switch. “Yes.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Only if I get a real interview out of it this time.”
“All right.” I didn’t hesitate. I wanted Matar very badly.
Corseau looked surprised, then spoke. “Yesterday afternoon they let a heart-attack victim and his wife off the ship. She confirmed that there were at least five terrorists on board. From pictures she identified the leader as Rashid Matar. They’re armed with machine guns, pistols, and grenades. They also claim that they’ve mined the fuel tanks with plastic explosive which can be detonated at second’s notice by radio control.”
George reached the Argos and began his circle, clockwise so my side faced the ship. I used the binoculars as I listened to Corseau.
The ship was a little over a hundred yards long and about fifty feet wide. There was a bridge deck forward of the smokestack, a cabin deck with a pool at the back, and below that a level with a large sunbathing deck at the back. There was a large radio and instrument mast sticking up from the back of the bridge deck. A line hung with miniature flags ran from the tip of the mast forward to the bow and backward to a spar that stuck up just forward of the swimming pool’s yellow and brown striped awning. The way they flapped briskly in the wind reminded me of a used-car lot.
Two men with machine guns stood on the roof of the bridge deck. They were looking our way.
George looked at me, surprise on his face. “I am receiving radio direction from army authorities to clear away from the ship.”
I chose a jump site, behind the smokestack, among large white ventilators. The two terrorists atop the bridge were staring at the helicopter. One of them lifted his gun and I saw the end of the barrel blink repeatedly, like he were taking flash pictures.
“Get out of here!” I kept the binoculars on the jump site, working for it, worried I wasn’t close enough. The helicopter dipped and spun wildly and I was afraid we’d been hit, but it was George taking evasive maneuvers. “Back to the Oceanography Institute.” I loosened the safety harness, pulled more money out of my little bag and clipped it to the preflight checklist clipboard. “There’s your fee, George.” I looked over my shoulder at Corseau. “Later, Jean-Paul.”
I jumped.
The deck vibrated slightly and I knew that if not engines, then at least generators were running. The flags on the line above me cracked in the wind. Off in the distance the sound of a helicopter in flight was fading. Other than that I heard nothing—no gunshots, voices, cries, or whispers. I might be alone on the broad ocean.
I wondered if Cox’s head had stopped hurting yet.
Using the dentist’s mirror I peered around the smokestack. I could only see one of the terrorists atop the bridge. Every so often, though, he lifted a radio to his lips and spoke, the sound lost in the wind.
I wondered if he could set off the radio-controlled explosions. Or if any of them could.
At the back of the bridge deck, on the other side of the smokestack, there was a door. I jumped there, just beside it. A slight overhang prevented discovery from above. I used the mirror to peer through the entrance. A narrow, door-lined central passage led forward to the bridge itself. Nobody was in sight.
I eased my way in, checking out the open doorways with the mirror. I’d almost reached the radio room, near the bridge itself, when I heard a chair creak and a footstep scuff the floor. I jumped back to the outside, by the rear door of the deckhouse. Footsteps sounded in the hall and receded. I used the mirror carefully, in time to see a man at the other end of the passage step into the bridge and turn right.
I jumped back to the passageway just outside the radio room. The mirror showed an empty room, shelves of impressive equipment. I eased forward, past the captain’s cabin, then looked into the bridge
itself. Nobody. The wheel stood motionless—radar, loran, chart table unattended. A narrow stairway descended to the next deck on both sides of the bridge. Overhead I heard one of the men on the roof walking back and forth with slightly dragging footsteps.
The man from the radio room had gone right—starboard, I corrected myself—so I went down the port side very slowly, very carefully.
The stairways opened on the next deck, on the outside. I eased the port door open and walked very close to the walls, shielding myself from the two men above. This was easier said than done, because deck chairs lined the wall and I had to either step carefully over or squeeze around them. The lifeboats were on this deck, hung on davits over the railings.
A door led into an air-conditioned central compartment, large stairwell in the middle, narrow corridor running aft lined with stateroom doors. Immediately to my left on entering the interior was a door labeled CASTOR GALLERY. There were no sounds from this deck but I thought I heard something from the stairwell so I eased down it.
Fortunately, it was thickly carpeted.
At the bottom, another narrow hallway ran aft down the center of the boat. On the port side of the boat was a glass door labeled COFFEE LOUNGE. On the starboard side was a hallway leading forward, from which the noise seemed to be coming. I peered carefully around a mahogany-trimmed corner. About seventy feet forward, where the hallway opened onto a larger space, a man stood, his back to me, machine gun held at the ready. Beyond him I saw people crowded together, sitting on the furniture or the floor.
The doorway framed only a small segment of that space but there were a lot of people visible.
I pulled back and went into the coffee lounge on the other side of the stairway. It was deserted, a light, cheerful narrow room decorated as a café. Another glass door at the far end was labeled BAR. It also was deserted, but that door was locked. I jumped to the other side. This room was pure men’s club, dark wood paneling and leather-upholstered chairs. The bottles behind the bar were all secured with little leather loops, for rough weather. A glass door at the far end was curtained.
A sign beside the door indicated that beyond it was the Golden Fleece Main Lounge. I pushed the curtain ever so slightly to one side. I was willing to lay bets that all 225 passengers and crew were crowded into that space.
The passengers were dressed formally, though rumpled. Most of the men’s ties were dangling or off. Several women looked like they’d spent far too much time in girdles. Others wore men’s jackets over their shoulders and leaned together. Nobody was talking.
The crew clustered together, officers and deckhands in whites, waiters and waitresses in dark uniforms, maids with aprons, cooks in more white, one with a chefs hat in his hand, barely recognizable from two days of twisting.
The captain, a white-haired man whose tanned legs were hard and muscled under his uniform shorts, sat in a chair, surrounded by his officers seated on the floor. They sat in front of the other hostages as if they could shield them from harm. The captain’s face was impassive, but his hands kept turning his hat around and around and around.
The lady who’d been released the day before was wrong. There were five terrorists in the lounge, three of them holding machine guns on the crowd, and the other two in conference. That meant there were at least seven in all.
More and more, I doubted the existence of other teleports. Cox’s reactions and my research seemed to point that way. Still, I sure could use a few more teleports about then.
I assumed that one of the terrorists talking was the man I’d followed from the radio room. The other was Rashid Matar.
I stared at him, eyes narrowed. My immediate, almost overpowering impulse was to jump him to just outside of my cliff dwelling, an area with nothing under it but two hundred feet of air. Well, after that, there was some rock and cactus, but the first two hundred feet...
Seven terrorists. My stomach hurt arid I could taste bile at the back of my throat.
The man who’d been watching the radio room finished talking with Matar and left. Matar turned and I saw that he had a radio in a leather holster, like the man on the bridge roof, but that a smaller radio hung from his neck on a lanyard, black plastic with a red button on its face.
I looked at the other terrorists, to see if they had one of these. They carried Uzis and four grenades apiece, clipped to the leather harness that supported their gun belts. Extra clips of ammo hung from the backs of the belts in leather cases. While they also had the holstered radios, they didn’t seem to have the bomb transmitter.
It was too much to hope that they were bluffing about the bomb. Rashid had already demonstrated his proficiency with radio-detonated explosives.
I jumped back to the coffee shop by the main stairwell and peeked through the door. The stairway was empty. One deck down was the purser’s office and reception. There was a map of the ship laminated to the reception desk and I studied it carefully.
Where I stood, at reception, was on the Dionysos Deck, one of four decks with cabins. The deck above, where the passengers were being held, was called the Venus Deck. The deck with the swimming pool was called the Apollo Deck. One flight down was the Poseidon Deck, and it had less than half the cabins of the other decks, since that was the level of the engine room.
I went down, carefully, but the next deck also seemed deserted. There was a door at the bottom, behind the stairs. It said ship’s personnel only. There was a glass porthole in the middle of it. I didn’t even try to open it. I just studied the white-painted passage beyond, and jumped into it.
The background hum that I’d felt above was audible in here, the distant sound of a diesel engine. I walked faster, confident that the noise would cover my passage. I passed through another door and found myself in the engine room, on a catwalk that ran between two huge diesel engines, each taller than I was. They were still, but at the front of the compartment, the diesel generators I’d suspected ran steadily, providing power for the air-conditioning.
The chief engineer’s office was forward of the engine room, a small cubbyhole filled with books and rolled-up plans. I pawed through the drawings, scattering them like autumn leaves, until I found the one that showed the diesel tanks. There were two of them, starboard and port, double-reinforced bulkheads forward of the engine compartment.
According to the plans, the tanks fronted on the outside walls of several compartments of the Poseidon Deck, including the chief engineer’s office. It was the work of a moment, though, to determine that the explosives were not in there, and I worked my way forward, blueprint in hand, examining all the possible rooms.
I didn’t find them. So I went upstairs at the front of the boat, still in the crew area, and found myself in the galley. According to the plans, the tops of the tank butted on the floor of the galley on the starboard side, as well as the floor of the passengers’ dining room on both sides of the ship. There were no explosives in the galley.
I moved carefully into the dining room. It was directly below the Golden Fleece Lounge, where all the hostages were, and an open stairway at the forward end of the room led up to there.
There were no explosives in the dining room either.
Could it mean that Matar had been bluffing? That there were no explosives rigged to detonate the fuel?
Another possibility occurred to me. What if they’d sealed the explosives, somehow, and lowered them into one of the tanks through the fueling spigots? According to the plans, those pipes were fourteen centimeters inside diameter, almost seven inches.
Somebody was crying upstairs, and someone else began shouting. I moved back into the galley to think.
It seemed unlikely that Matar would have put the bombs inside the tanks. The double steel bulkhead would have interfered with radio transmission. It also seemed unlikely that he would have bluffed about the bomb.
I looked around. A cooking range with sixteen burners stretched down one wall of the galley, large stainless-steel pots standing. Walk-in refrigerators and freezers
lined the far wall. A bank of ovens covered yet another.
Cooking range?
I flipped one of the knobs. Bight blue flames erupted from the burner. Cooking gas! Much more explosive than diesel fuel and probably closer to the hostages. I thought about trying to trace the gas lines, but instead jumped back to the chief engineer’s office and searched through more drawings.
The cooking gas was kept in a large cylindrical tank behind the galley in a separately ventilated room. I jumped back to the galley and found a door leading forward. The first door on the right, a gasketed sea door with steel dogs, was labeled PROPANE GAS STORAGE—NO SMOKING.
Two massive lengths of chain secured the door, running to large security padlocks that still had the price stickers affixed. There was no inset window or bull’s-eye and no way I could get past the door.
For one long desperate minute I considered going after one of the NSA guns, the real ones, not the tranquilizers, and just shooting Matar, grabbing the detonator, and jumping away.
Stupid, the idea is to avoid killing anybody, especially hostages.
Even Matar?
I looked at the plans again. There was no other way to get into the room. The ventilators were lengths of pipe, twisting, not even providing a view within.
Time to get rid of the detonator, then.
I jumped back to the closed and shrouded bar and peeked past the curtains again. One of the terrorists was taking passengers to the bathroom in relays of four. Rashid was pacing back and forth, occasionally lifting his holstered radio to speak. The detonator swung back and forth on his neck lanyard.
I jumped back to the central hall on the Apollo Deck and went back through the central passageway to the pool. There was another bar, poolside. Shielded from the terrorists on the bridge roof by the bar awning, I looked over the side. From this deck there was a drop of about thirty feet to the water below. It wasn’t my pit, but it would do. I studied the railing carefully, then jumped back to the bar.
The next group of passengers went up the hallway with their guard. This left two men standing at the corners of the lounge, machine guns covering the group, and Matar pacing up and down between them.
