Medusa Rising

by Cindy Dees

  Johannson managed a “Why?”

  Michael replied as gently as he could, “Consider it a show of force to impress our seriousness upon the crew and passengers.” It also eliminated the most likely source of any impetus to re-take the ship.

  His earpiece crackled and Viktor directed calmly, “Report.” Nobody’d ever guess the bastard had just murdered nine men in cold blood. This whole thing was a walk in the park for him.

  Paulo answered first, and Michael heard cries and screams in the background. “All the officers in the Safari Lounge are dead. The passengers are hysterical but doing as ordered.”

  René piped up from the Galaxy Room. “Same here. Officers dead, passengers freaked out but cooperative.”

  “Michael?”

  Michael started. Hastily, he pulled himself together. “All quiet up here. I believe the ladies understand the situation.”

  Vigorous nods from his hostages as they continued to eye his weapon.

  “Very well, then,” Viktor replied casually. “On to the next phase. Michael, if you please.”

  “Coming up.” He moved over to the ship’s PA system. “We will begin with the Safari Lounge. All male passengers from that location will now move in an orderly, single-file line to the lifeboat stations on Deck 5. May I remind you that your children’s lives depend on your cooperation.”

  The three women across the room sucked in their breath. “You’re putting the passengers off the ship?” Gwyn asked hopefully.

  “Just the men,” he answered absently. He moved to the doorway of the ship’s security office, which opened directly off the bridge. He angled himself so he could watch the women and keep an eye on the progress of the evacuation via the ship’s security cameras. The rotating camera views blinked throughout the ship, painting a scene of deserted decks and corridors punctuated by rooms full of terrified people. An image flashed across the screen of a row of crumpled piles of fabric on a stage and he looked away quickly. But not quickly enough. The image of the dead bodies burned into his brain, damning him to certain hell. But what else could he have done? There were the children to think about.

  An image of them huddled together with tear-stained faces and huge, terrified eyes flashed on one of the monitors. He cursed viciously and yanked his gaze away from the picture. He concentrated on the long line of men filing down the promenade deck toward the lifeboats. A burst of gunfire drew his attention, and he felt the women behind him flinch.

  He spoke over his shoulder. “That was the radios and engines being knocked out on the first lifeboat before the passengers are loaded. Nobody was hurt.”

  Why he felt compelled to reassure the women, he had no idea. Maybe he was reassuring himself more than them.

  The disembarkation of the male passengers took a while. Each one was required to show his shipboard identity pass and was matched to the digital picture printed on the card. The cruise line had even been thoughtful enough to come up with hand-held scanners to read the bar code on each passenger ID card as passengers got on and off the ship. Under normal circumstances, the system allowed the ship’s crew to make sure they left no passenger or crew member behind in a port of call. But today, it would be used to verify exactly who was on and off the ship.

  Another burst of gunfire, and another fifty-man lifeboat was loaded up and winched down to the water. The boats looked like oversize clamshells with hard, domed covers that completely enclosed the passengers against rough seas. There was emergency water aboard each boat, and they were being dropped off near a major shipping lane. Someone would find them drifting in the water soon enough. And, once the first lifeboat was found, a massive search would no doubt be undertaken to find the others. It would be interesting to see who responded to that initial emergency call. Odds were the crew had gotten off a quick distress call before he’d taken the bridge, but when word got out to the international media from the rescued passengers, all hell should break loose.

  The nationality of the rescue team had been the only point of uncertainty in the planning of this mission. The ship was well into international waters, and there was no telling which navy would ultimately end up responsible for reacting to the hijacking. The majority of the passengers were American, Bahamian waters were nearest, the ship’s registry was the British Virgin Islands and most of the crew was Scandinavian. Odds were the Brits or the Americans would end up in charge, because of their powerful navies flanking the two shores of the Atlantic. Not that it really mattered. As long as all those children remained hostages, no navy was going to do a damned thing to the Grand Adventure.

  After the Safari Lounge was emptied of men, the Galaxy Room’s male occupants were logged out of the ship’s computer and herded onto disabled lifeboats in similar fashion. And then it was time to move the male crewmen. Most of the remaining gunmen converged on the crew lest they have second thoughts about cooperating with their forced evacuation. They were herded down to deck one, the lowest level of the ship. One of the forward hatches right at the water line was opened, and the entire male crew was disgorged onto life rafts after showing their ID cards and being checked off the crew complement list. The cruise line hadn’t been smart enough to leave their security men and divers off the list, either. They were tracked with special emphasis to make sure every last one of them was off the ship.

  The passengers might get fancy boats with spare supplies, but the crew got good old-fashioned forty-man rubber life rafts. The men put up an initial protest at being loaded eighty men to a raft, but the ominous swing of MP-5s in their direction squelched the complaints. Overloading the life rafts so badly had been Michael’s idea, too. Hopefully, his controls in London would assume the ideas he’d forwarded to them had been used in this attack and would react accordingly. But, since he’d had no direct contact with his handlers since he went undercover, it was hard to know if they’d be that smart or not.

  The rafts would stay afloat—barely—and would be a handful to manage. The crewmen would be so busy surviving in the overcrowded, difficult conditions, they’d have no time to compare notes on what had happened and mess around with thoughts of retaking the ship. When other ships picked them up, it would take that much longer to gather intelligent ideas on the subject and relay useful information to the commandos who would make an attempt to rescue the hostages.

  And therein lay his greatest worry. That some admiral somewhere would try to be a hero by sending in an underarmed, undermanned Special Forces team. Whoever came aboard, they would need a small army and a large arsenal. Viktor was a blood-thirsty bastard who wouldn’t hesitate to slaughter the remaining passengers and crew, regardless of their age or gender. Hopefully, the rescued men would relay that fact in forceful terms to whoever found them.

  He scanned the horizon through the bridge’s panoramic windows, although he doubted they’d ever make visual contact with whatever rescue force was sent after them. They’d never see more than a momentary blip on the ship’s big radar screen to indicate the cavalry had arrived.

  And now the waiting game began.

  They were sent back to their rooms to rest while Navy Intelligence tried to verify the distress call. Aleesha lay in bed for a long time, her thoughts spinning. Maybe it would turn out to be a hoax. Please God, let it be a hoax! Dread filled her, not about doing the job—her training was too good for that—but about the number of deaths that could so easily occur aboard a hijacked passenger ship. Thirty-five hundred men, women and children. The thought of how many might die before this was all said and done made her nauseous. Her physician’s need to save them all rumbled strong in her gut. She would do this mission alongside her colleagues, but she emphatically did not share their certainty of a positive outcome for this scenario. And whether that made her the lone sane person or the lone nutcase was anybody’s guess.

  Eventually her brain retreated from the potential horrors, and she managed to fall asleep. But her dreams were as troubled as her waking thoughts.

  Chapter 5

  Al
eesha jerked to full consciousness as her beeper went off. Time to go back onto the ward already? Navy hospitals were chronically understaffed with so many of their people deployed overseas, particularly when it came to trauma surgeons. When her boss scheduled shift rotations, it didn’t help that she was unmarried and had no social life. She always got stuck with the oddball hours.

  Aleesha blinked and sat up in the faint pink glow from a halogen streetlamp outside. The low rattle of an air conditioner. Gray wool blankets tangled at the foot of a double bed. A painting of an aircraft carrier faintly visible over a television. Wait a minute. This wasn’t the residents’break room. Where was she? Her brain felt like mush as she swam through it toward consciousness. She was in the visiting officer’s quarters at Norfolk Naval Air Station in Virginia. For an exercise. Except it wasn’t an exercise anymore. They were working with SEALs. Didn’t those bastards ever sleep? What sleep? They didn’t need no stinkin’ sleep. What time was it, anyway?

  She reached over for her beeper, which was still trilling insistently, and pushed the button that turned off the painful noise. A digital clock in the corner of the display read 1:00 a.m. She’d gotten about three hours of sleep. Just enough to make her whole body ache desperately for another six hours’ rest. She staggered out of bed and into the bathroom. Her head felt full of rocks. She splashed cold water on her face and felt a little better, but it was still godawful to be alerted on so little sleep.

  She stumbled into fatigues, zipped up her boots and took a second to run a brush through her thick, sable hair. Because of her mixed ancestry, it was the true, midnight black of her African heritage, but it had the generally silky texture of her European ancestors. She pulled it back into a totally nonregulation pony-tail. One of the perks of Special Forces: nonmilitary hair was not only legal but encouraged. It helped operators blend in with civilian populations.

  She brushed her teeth quickly and started to feel marginally alive. Marginally being the operative word. She stepped into the hallway and Misty Cordell was coming out of her room next door. They rolled their eyes at each other and headed for the lobby. The other four Medusas were already there.

  “Now what?” Misty asked.

  Aleesha frowned. Good question. They didn’t have their own transportation, nor did they have any idea where they were supposed to go. The phone number that had set off her beeper was Bud Lipton’s cell phone, but there was no sign of him. She looked around the deserted lobby and spied the one thing that could make her feel more human. Coffee. It was one of the redeeming qualities of life in the military. No matter where she was, day or night, there was always a pot simmering somewhere nearby.

  She headed gratefully for the coffeemaker and poured herself a stiff slug of the brew. She took a sip and grimaced. It was a miracle this stuff hadn’t melted her spoon when she’d stirred in a little creamer. She didn’t even want to think about what it would do to her stomach lining.

  She’d just finished it off when Bud Lipton spoke quietly from the doorway. “Get a refill on the java and grab lids for your cups. We need to go. Now.”

  Aleesha spun around and studied him closely. Crap. She could see it in his eyes. The radio call had been verified. She and the others followed him to a van parked out front. They piled in silently, Aleesha in the front seat.

  “What’s up?” she asked him.

  He glanced over at her and she recoiled at the look in his eyes. Whoa. Definitely something ugly going down. During their training, she’d seen operators launched for real several times and their intensity levels went from zero to sixty in nothing flat, but it was always eagerness she saw gleaming in their eyes. Tonight, Bud looked like someone had just murdered a baby. His baby. That was death glinting in his eyes.

  “A Japanese cargo vessel found a little surprise floating around in the eastern Bahamas at around midnight. It confirms this afternoon’s distress call from the Grand Adventure.”

  Okay. So far nothing to explain his extreme attitude. What could it be? Foreboding filled her. “And it was—”

  “Some of the passengers off the Grand Adventure. In a lifeboat.”

  Aleesha frowned. “Did the ship sink?”

  “Nope. According to the folks who’ve been picked up, the hijackers tossed all the men off the ship.”

  Sweet Jesus. Her pulse jumped and her brain went into overdrive. She recognized her crisis response mechanism and let it take over. In full trauma-surgeon mode, she asked, “Casualties?”

  “All the ship’s officers are reported dead.”

  Dead? Her brain froze, trying unsuccessfully to wrap around that one. A ship that size would have—what? Twenty or thirty officers? And they were all dead? She’d seen emergency rooms filled with that many victims. She knew how many family members milled around outside praying for that many loved ones. They had wives, children, parents and a host of others, all of whom would be devastated by this.

  She tuned back in to what Bud was saying.

  “—bunch of children are being held hostage. We don’t know much more than that. General Wittenauer said to bring you down with my team for the full sitrep.”

  The Medusas got to hear the full situation report? General Hal Wittenauer himself wanted them involved? He was the commander of JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command—and was responsible for coordinating the activities of all the Special Forces elements within the armed forces of the United States. He was also the Medusas’boss. They reported directly to him, and through Wittenauer, to the president of the United States. The two men had created the Medusas in an extremely secret executive order last winter.

  Did the fact that Wittenauer was including them in the situation briefing mean they were definitely going to take part in the response to this hijacking? Her adrenaline level leaped by several more notches. Abruptly, she was wide awake. And the coffee had absolutely nothing to do with it.

  She eyed the glow of the flightline looming ahead and frowned. “Where exactly is this briefing going to happen?”

  “Homestead.”

  “As in Homestead Air Force Base, Miami?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Interrogators have flown out to the ship that picked up the first people and are talking to them now. They’ll try to piece together what happened for us by the time we get to Florida. There’s a search on for more passengers. So far, three boatloads have been picked up.”

  Without any more warning than that, she and the rest of the Medusas hustled aboard a Navy P-3, strapped into the uncomfortable web seats lining its cargo compartment and, along with Bud’s SEAL team, winged off into the night with the clothes on their backs, their bellies full of coffee and their heads ringing with questions.

  Welcome to the big leagues, baby.

  Michael rubbed his eyes and glanced at his watch: 4:00 a.m. He probably ought to let one of the other guys take the bridge for a while and get some rest. But, truth be told, he hesitated to turn over control of the three women officers to anyone else. He cursed under his breath. He knew better. He couldn’t afford to reveal any weakness that might tip off Viktor. His survival, and potentially the survival of hundreds of innocents, rode on him maintaining his cover and waiting for an opportunity to stop this madness. Michael took a deep breath. Stay cool. Be sharp.

  He took another swig of coffee and focused on the bank of monitors. The Americans were still clearing the ship. It was tedious but necessary. As they’d expected, the list of men who’d been put off the ship differed slightly from the passenger and crew manifests. Four crew members and two passengers had been unaccounted for.

  Both passengers had been found quickly, hiding in their rooms—how dumb was that—and eliminated. One of the crewmen had been located and similarly dispatched, but three crewmen were still at large. The team responsible for clearing the ship was doing it right, taking its time and being thorough with a room-by-room, hall-by-hall, cranny-by-cranny search of the vessel. Based on the Americans’ techniques they’d probably been trained by some ex-U.S. Army Specia
l Forces types.

  He rubbed his hands over the stubble on his cheeks. He’d been in this business too damned long if he could identify the country of origin of a Tango by the search methods the blighter used. He’d been on some wild ops in his day, but this one took the cake. Hands down.

  One of the women in the next room cried out and he lurched to his feet, battle ready. He raced out low and fast, his MP-5 in front of him. A quick sweep around the bridge. Empty. The three women huddled on the floor in the corner, using their uniform jackets for pillows. Their feet were tied together so they slept in a starburst pattern. They looked like a bad parody of an Esther Williams movie. Johannson was restless but unconscious. She must have cried out in her sleep. No surprise that young Inger was having nightmares tonight.

  Staring at the sleeping women, he let out his breath slowly. He was wired way too tight for his own good. Or for theirs.

  The flight took several hours, and this time Aleesha didn’t make the mistake of staying awake once they were airborne. Sleep was a precious commodity in this line of work.

  The sky was steel-gray, heralding the imminent approach of dawn, when they stepped off the jet in Miami. The air was cool and damp and carried the decaying, briny odor of the ocean. Yup, back in Florida. A van whisked them across the base to the command post. As they were let into the secure facility, she spied General Wittenauer and a team of intelligence analysts, already hard at work on phones and computers in the operations center they’d more or less taken over. No doubt teasing all the information they could out of whatever mysterious intel sources they called upon in a crisis like this.

  The SEALs and Medusas were ushered through the semi-twilight of the communications room to an attached briefing room that sported soundproof walls and a glass window looking out on the communications center and its teeming activity.

  They didn’t have to wait long. Wittenauer made one last pass around the outer room to collect a series of note cards. He was still thumbing through them as he stepped into the briefing room and shut the door. Nothing like information hot off the presses. She leaned forward in her seat and noticed that everyone else in the room had, too.