by Cindy Dees
The women strolled aboard, and, in keeping with their cover story, headed straight down to the bowels of the ship. It smelled strongly of diesel oil and was cramped and cold. Aleesha went first, turning on lights and powering up a couple of generators as she went. The guys on the bridge would no doubt be tracking their progress via such signals.
Misty stayed in a bilge compartment with a wrench to pound on a pipe and turn on generators occasionally as if the team was still down here working.
The other three women crept forward in the dark, using their flashlights to wind their way through the maze of self-sealing compartments that made up this portion of the ship. Reviewing the destroyer’s blueprints in her head, Aleesha stopped under a ladder midship that should take them all the way up to the bridge. It was going to be a bitch to navigate the narrow, steep stairs in silence with the fuel tanks and welding torch, but, Lordy, it was going to be worth it. Time to go shock the hell out of a SEAL team.
On the Grand Adventure, the men left the room in pairs, their weapons concealed, over the course of several minutes—another precaution to keep a snitch from alerting the crew. Only Viktor would proceed alone. He flung the scuba bag over his shoulder, a loaded AK-47 inside it. He walked down the long hall and stepped into the first elevator that arrived. To his annoyance, it stopped at the next deck. The door opened, and two couples crowded inside. One of the men jostled him, bumping squarely into the bag. Damn! Did the guy realize what he’d just hit? Viktor watched for alarm in the guy’s face. Nothing. The guy probably thought the weapon was just a piece of scuba gear. The elevator opened on Deck 5, and the couples got out. Sacré Dieu. Alone at last. He pressed the button for Deck 4.
He stepped into the stairwell and headed for the kids’ adventure area. He walked past Antonio without making eye contact. The Spaniard was almost done chaining shut the unmarked double doors that were the emergency exits from the kids’ area. François loitered nearby. Perfect timing. Excellent. Time to move on to the main objective.
Viktor rounded the corner and saw the three members of his team who would converge on the entrance to the kids’ area. Without a single one of them breaking stride, they all arrived at the wide set of doors at the identical moment.
If the Americans were on time for once, several of them should be walking into the ship’s business center right now, seizing all its computer and telephone lines with ship-to-shore capabilities. Another group was headed for engineering, and the remainder of his men were headed for the bridge, led by Michael.
Viktor nodded once at the men with him. Shoulder to shoulder they strode forward, pushing open the swinging doors. With the precision of a drill team, they swung their weapons out from under their shirts, out of bags and out of waistbands. A female attendant wearing a bright orange shirt looked up, startled by their entrance. But then she actually smiled! What the hell did she think was going on here?
Somehow managing to be perky while whispering, she said, “You guys are early. The movie’s not over for another hour. Do you want to come back then or do you have another appearance scheduled somewhere else on the ship?”
Viktor’s jaw went slack until it dawned on him that the bimbo thought they were some sort of entertainment provided by the ship in conjunction with the movie premiere. Mary, Mother of God, what a fool she was.
“I’d suggest you turn off the movie. Now. It is time for us to make our grand entrance right this minute.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she whispered back, still clueless. “The kids would mutiny on the spot.”
“Do it,” he murmured savagely. “Or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
She blinked, taken aback by his tone of voice, but in chipper, cruise-line-employee fashion she smiled again. And smiled her last. He tapped his trigger twice, dropping her to the floor in a pool of her own blood. The gunshot was mostly masked by the blaring action on the movie screen, but the noise did attract the attention of two more attendants, a guy and a girl, also sporting obnoxious orange polo shirts.
The guy knelt quickly by his fallen co-worker’s side and lurched as his hand came away covered with real, warm blood. He looked up in horror and opened his mouth, but Viktor raised his AK-47 and pointed it at him. The guy’s gaze riveted on the bore of the weapon in utter disbelief.
“Let’s try this again,” Viktor snarled. “Turn off the goddamned movie now, or I’ll kill you, too.”
The guy backed away, nodding frantically, and stumbled toward the sound booth, bumping into a couple of kids seated on the tiered steps of the room in the process. The kids squawked, but the guy kept going. Smart boy. Might even live long enough to get off the ship alive.
The overhead lights came on abruptly, and the movie cut off. An angry outcry went up from four hundred childish throats. Another orange shirt bounced up in front of the room with cheerleader-like energy and said loudly, “Don’t worry, kids, we’ll get the movie back on in just a few seconds. How do you like it so far?”
Another collective shout, this time of approval. Viktor stepped farther into the room, in plain view of all present, staff and children alike. He was flanked on either side by his team.
He announced loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Boys and girls, there’s been a slight change in the schedule.”
Aleesha peered around the corner using a hand-held periscope at a height of approximately two inches above the floor. She saw movement on the bridge through the glass portholes in the upper portion of the double doors, which were hung so they would swing outward. The triple-reinforced steel they were made of would make it damned hard for the SEALs to shoot their way out once they realized they were trapped.
Isabella carried the steel bar they would slip through the double door handles, and which Karen would weld in place to hold the doors shut. Aleesha watched Isabella ease forward and silently deposit the fuel tanks for the torch beside the door and carefully slid the bar into place. Then, she slipped off to run another steel bar through the handle on the captain’s private entrance to the bridge.
Aleesha waited for Isabella’s return and her quick grin indicating mission accomplished before giving Karen the thumb’sup to work her way over to the door. It was an exercise in self-discipline to wait and watch during the long minutes it took Karen to slime over to the door and set up her welding rig in utter silence. A couple of times men glanced out the door windows, and each time Aleesha yanked back the periscope lest it be spotted. After yet another such incident, she eased the periscope around the corner again. Karen had pulled her welder’s mask down over her face, the signal that she was ready to go. Aleesha signaled over her shoulder at Isabella, who headed for the ladder behind them. Once she was clear of the immediate area, Isabella would radio Vanessa and Kat telling them to create a diversion that would draw the attention of the SEALs to the windows facing outside. The noise of explosives would also mask those first few critical seconds of noise from the welding torch.
With her eye still plastered to the periscope to make sure no SEAL was looking out the window, Aleesha stuck a single finger past the wall at floor height, signaling Karen to stand by. Now all they had to do was wait for the fireworks to begin.
It didn’t take long. In under a minute, explosions boomed. Karen immediately fired up her torch and got to work. It was hard to believe that nobody inside heard the hissing burn, but then, Vanessa and Kat had a veritable barrage of flash bangs going off outside. They were using training charges in the grenades, only a fraction of the strength of real grenades, but they still made an impressive amount of noise.
The first door was lightly soldered to the steel bar. Karen moved on to the second door. She’d been at it about fifteen seconds when the noise outside came to an abrupt halt. The girls downstairs had used up all their toys. But it had been enough. The doors would be too hot to touch for several minutes.
The SEALs raced over to the bridge entrance and jumped back in shock as the first guy hit the door and singed his shoulder. Aleesha watched in
grand amusement as their heads instantly disappeared from view. No doubt they were crawling around in there, setting up an ambush for whoever was about to burst through the door to take over their bridge. She grinned at their mistake. These guys would learn that the Medusas never did anything by brute force if they could avoid it.
The few seconds the SEALs took to set up on the other side of the door were enough. Karen had finished the second weld. Aleesha stuck her hand around the corner and signaled her to bug out. Now.
Karen turned off the torch, dropped it, and sprinted for the stairwell in one fluid move. She dived around the corner as the SEALs first rubber bullets hit the portholes in the bridge doors. For the purposes of the exercise, that would count as a clean getaway or at worst a superficial injury.
Aleesha led the way down a side hall and ducked into an engineering closet that supplied air-conditioning to the bridge. She tossed a couple of training grenades into the appropriate vent and watched in satisfaction as the first one rolled to a stop against a metal grate leading into the bridge. She ducked just before it blew, but popped up as soon as the initial smoke cleared. Yup, just as she’d thought. Even a training charge was enough to blow the grate out. She tossed a couple more simulated grenades down the vent and watched them disappear into the bridge. She wouldn’t actually detonate those grenades because of the amount of sensitive equipment that they could damage, not the least of which was the eardrums of the SEALs currently trapped on said bridge.
Of course, actual grenades going off in the enclosed space of the bridge would splatter a real bridge crew like fish in a barrel. The SEALs knew it and would have no choice but to roll over and play dead for the remainder of the exercise.
The Medusas had done it. The ship was theirs.
Except…
As Aleesha led her triumphant teammates downstairs to take possession of the auxiliary controls of the ship, the victory felt hollow in her gut. She kept picturing those grenades rolling down the air vent and dropping out of sight. Did she have it in her to do that for real? Could she kill helpless, trapped men in cold blood under combat conditions?
She was a doctor, for God’s sake. Had held up her hand and taken the Hippocratic oath to cause no harm to her patients. And, face it, by natural inclination it wasn’t her style to hurt any living thing.
Yeah, it was a hell of kick working with the Medusas. She loved the adrenaline rush, the sheer excitement of what they did. But so far everything they had done, with the lone exception of the rescue mission to save Jack—which had gone off like clockwork and had not required her to personally kill anyone—had been training. Sure, she’d shot some men at that oil rig in Bhoukar. But she was good enough that she’d been able to drop them with nonlife-threatening injuries. And maybe that should have been a red flag.
Whether she wanted to face it or not, all of this fancy training the Medusas were doing added up to one thing. They were being turned into highly effective killing machines. Could she do that? Could she kill other human beings on command? Her first love and her first career were being a doctor. And military doctors were pretty much never called upon to kill. They merely fixed the people who did the dirty work. How was this second career as a special operator supposed to mesh with healing? Was she in an impossible situation? She knew one thing for sure. She needed to answer that question once and for all. Soon. Before the Medusas went operational for real.
The children didn’t catch on right away, not even the older ones. But the staff did. They went sickly shades of pale that clashed with their garish shirts, and in terse tones they ordered the children to stay seated.
Viktor growled at the panicked guy in the sound room. “Call the bridge and tell the captain that we have taken approximately four hundred children hostage in the kids’ adventure area.”
Some of the older children went quiet at that. But the little ones bounced with excitement at this live action adventure playing itself out around them. The twins were in here somewhere. He’d bet they’d caught on the moment they’d spotted him. Although he’d never been overtly cruel, they’d always been cautious of him, probably sensing the danger lying beneath his average facade. When their mother wasn’t present to shield them, they’d always trod lightly around him. The very fact that he couldn’t spot them in the crowd, that they were laying low, was proof of their fear of him. Clever little brats.
The staff guy talked urgently into a telephone.
It was only a matter of seconds until a Scandinavian-accented voice came over the PA system. “This is Captain Dageskold. Please do not harm the children. What is it you want?”
Viktor murmured into his microphone, “Now, Michael. And be quick about it.” He probably didn’t have to remind the Irishman that speed was of the essence in this next maneuver. The rest of the Basques, led by Michael Somerset, must take over the bridge before the ship’s crew realized what was going on and got any bright ideas about mounting some sort of counterattack.
Michael Somerset opened his briefcase and pulled out the sawed-off MP-5 inside. He released the safety and hefted the weapon easily in the crook of his arm. It felt surreal to be striding down the plush hallway of a cruise ship armed like this, the sound of his passage absorbed by the thick carpet beneath his feet.
An urge to take off running and flee this nightmare nearly overcame him. The back of his neck felt hot, and he even had to choke back a brief need to vomit. He would spin around and shoot dead the six men behind him if he thought he could get them all before one of them shot him back. But he dared not try it. The other hijackers all had their weapons in hand and at the ready, and in the amount of time it would take him to rake a field of fire across six men, at least one of them would have time to return fire at him. If even one man walked away from his attack alive to report it, Viktor Dupont would take it out in blood upon the children downstairs. And in the meantime, Michael would die, too, and those kids’ best ally—a good guy on the inside—would be lost.
Goddamn Viktor for springing the mission on him like this! He’d had no time to warn the authorities, no time to avert the hijacking he’d been working undercover for two long years to thwart. He’d planned to gather the final details, then report to London one last time. A sting operation would no doubt be launched on both sides of the Atlantic to arrest the entire ring of would-be hijackers and bust up the conspiracy.
But thanks to Viktor’s unexpected move, now there were children staring at the business ends of machine guns, and Michael was on his way to take over the bridge of a ship—by deadly force if necessary. In moments he and/or the men behind him might very well splatter the brains of the bridge crew all over the walls. What in the hell was he supposed to do now? Blow his cover? Identify himself to the captain and tell the guy to radio for help?
If it weren’t for all those kids, he’d do it in a second. But Viktor was below and was perfectly capable of blowing away a couple hundred kids without a shred of remorse. The bastard had successfully tied Michael’s hands by sending him up here with a half-dozen armed hijackers at his back.
And that worried the hell out of him. Viktor was violent, but extremely methodical in his thinking. No way had he randomly decided to turn what was supposed to be a dress rehearsal into the real thing. So why had he done it this way?
Viktor’s explanation, that the subterfuge had kept everyone relaxed when they boarded the ship, was a load of crap. And that could mean only one thing. He must know there was an informer in their midst. Michael didn’t know whether to swear viciously or give in to the lingering urge to puke.
Unfortunately, he had time for neither. The double swinging doors leading to the bridge loomed just ahead. He gestured to his men to move to the side, out of the line of sight of anyone looking through the small, round—undoubtedly bulletproof—portholes at eye level. He tried the varnished teak door, although the door should be locked even under normal circumstances.
Yup, locked up tighter than a drum.
For lack of any other alter
native that wouldn’t get kids killed, he keyed his radio according to the plan and reported to Viktor, “As expected, the bridge is locked.” Silently he begged the captain not to test Viktor, not to measure just how far the Basque expatriate was willing to go.
Good Lord. Michael’s palms were actually sweating. He hadn’t been this nervous since his first dead drop in his initial espionage training a decade ago. Somehow in the next few minutes, he had to find a way to take over the damned bridge and not kill the entire bridge crew. How he was going to pull that off, he had no earthly idea.
Viktor looked up at the control booth. “Tell your captain to let in my men, who are just outside the bridge. He’s to turn over control of the ship to them. Any resistance from the ship’s crew will result in the death of several dozen of these children.”
That got the kids’ attention. The room went silent for exactly two seconds, and then the brats pitched a collective fit. The din was deafening. Viktor barely heard his earpiece when Michael announced tersely that the bridge was still locked.
Viktor shouted over the caterwauling to the young man in the control booth, “Tell your captain we have multiple automatic weapons aimed at these children. He has ten seconds to surrender the bridge or I will begin shooting.”
Viktor allowed a few seconds for the message to be relayed, and then started counting. He waited calmly. It made no difference to him one way or another whether the bastard opened the bridge doors or not. He had literally hundreds of children at his disposal. He’d start with the noisy ones. The captain wouldn’t hold out for long.
He saw the staff guy talking frantically on the phone. Probably verifying to the captain that Viktor wasn’t lying and that one of his co-workers was dead already.
