Medusa Rising

by Cindy Dees

  Over the course of the next hour, they trickled out of their hiding place in ones and twos. Aleesha and Isabella made their way to another crew stateroom that had been carefully chosen for its proximity to certain electrical wiring they’d need to access for the next part of the op. That and the fact that both of its male occupants were currently aboard the Teddy R.

  They’d dubbed this room Point Bravo. The other Medusas took up positions in rooms in each direction down the hall from it to act as lookouts.

  Aleesha moved to the far wall of the room, tapping the metal plating gently with her knuckles, testing the thickness of the steel. She commented over her shoulder, “According to the blueprints, the line we need should run right about here.” She had a nifty little gadget that would cut a piece of the wall out nearly silently. She’d splice into the wire behind it and put the panel right back. Slick as a whistle. She pulled out the hand-held welding torch and touched her throat mike. “Standing by to proceed,” she murmured.

  Misty reported from her position in a room at the far end of the hallway, “All clear.”

  Vanessa came up on the headset and said, “All clear at this end. Go for it.”

  Aleesha warned Isabella, “Don’t look at this torch once I fire it up. The light could damage your eyes.”

  Her teammate averted her eyes, and Aleesha slipped on a pair of welding goggles and fired up the torch. It was dicey to cut through the metal of the inner hull without slicing up the very wires she was trying to access. But it was no harder than cutting into human skin with a scalpel. She exhaled smoothly, settled into surgeon mode and went to work on her steel patient.

  A couple of minutes later, she carefully lifted out a foot-long piece of hot steel and set it on the floor. She dug into her pack and pulled out the clips and wires she’d need to make the splice. It only took a few seconds to connect her duplicates and secure them with electrical tape. She unrolled the wire, routing it around the edge of the ceiling and caulking it in place with a miniature caulking gun. Then she ran the wires down the intersection of the walls and along the floorboards to a tiny desk beside the bed.

  Isabella unwrapped a small TV monitor with a built-in VCR in its base. As Aleesha fed the wires to the desk, she remarked, “Hell of a way to get the ship’s pay-per-view movies for free, eh?”

  Isabella chuckled. “All I need are the feeds that go to the ship’s safety office, thanks. Then I’ll be able to watch every inch of the ship.”

  With a few notable exceptions, of course, like the interiors of cabins. But anytime the hijackers moved through one of the ship’s public areas, whoever was watching the monitor could see them. The job of babysitting this camera would fall to Isabella and Karen. Isabella because of her expertise as a real-time photo intelligence analyst. She’d been trained in how to assess images from cameras mounted on unmanned aerial reconnaissance planes. Looking at images from still cameras would be a breeze.

  Karen would help because of the potential difficulties of Karen blending in among the other female passengers. Nearly six feet tall and muscular, Karen was an Amazon warrior of a woman. She stood out in a crowd not only because of her physical stature, but also because of her sheer presence, honed over years as a female Marine officer. No way would the hijackers have not noticed her before, and if she suddenly showed up among the passengers, the terrorists would smell a rat. The two women would hide in this room for the duration or until all hell broke loose and their firepower was required elsewhere. Good Lord willing, that would not be a factor anytime soon.

  Aleesha made the connections to the back of the TV monitor and turned it on. It flickered once, and then an image of an empty hallway leaped into view. Isabella pushed a button on the remote control that went with the TV, and an empty restaurant came onto the screen. Aleesha packed up her tools while Isabella flipped quickly through the channels, learning how to navigate the two-hundred-plus security cameras on the ship.

  “Up and running,” Isabella murmured into her throat mike.

  “Any terrorist movement?” Vanessa’s voice asked.

  “Not yet. Could take me a while to get the hang of the system and start spotting Tangos.”

  They would sit tight in their current positions until Isabella had a good feel for the ship’s routine. Whether that would take hours or days was anybody’s guess.

  Pleading insomnia, Michael wandered the ship aimlessly for most of the night and all of the next morning. He didn’t seriously expect one of the commandos who’d come aboard last night to walk up and tap him on the shoulder. Nonetheless, his inability to find them was enormously frustrating. They were here somewhere. But his chances of finding any of them were nil.

  Wherever they were hiding on the ship, they undoubtedly had some sort of escape route laid out. Assuming he could actually find their hidey-hole, as soon as they saw him coming—and he had no illusions that he’d approach them unseen—they’d hightail it out of there. If he was unlucky and surprised them, these men would take him out without a moment’s hesitation. A hell of a conundrum, it was.

  A little before noon, Viktor radioed him. “I understand you had trouble sleeping last night.”

  “It’s nothing,” he replied smoothly. “Just getting myself onto a night schedule so I can pull the night shifts.”

  “That’s generous of you.”

  Michael frowned. Was that suspicion he heard in Viktor’s voice? God, he hated living and breathing to keep this madman happy. He replied hastily, “It’s not about generosity. It’s about you getting some decent sleep if I’m on the job instead of you.”

  Viktor didn’t respond to that. He’d take such a gesture as his due. Instead he said, “I called to tell you to arrange to have lunch brought up to the suite. In an hour for about twelve of us.”

  “Of course. I’ll take care of it right away.” Michael glanced down at his watch. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “No,” Viktor replied. “That will be all.”

  Bastard. Michael hung up his phone gently. When the time came, he hoped the commandos blew Viktor’s head off.

  Chapter 10

  Aleesha plucked at her pink polo shirt, which wasn’t quite wide enough across the shoulders. She had that problem a lot these days. After six months of being a Medusa, she was in better physical condition than she’d ever believed possible—and she’d been a fair athlete before she’d ever heard of the Medusa Project. She had yet to find a brand of clothes cut for the female superathlete. At least the white shorts she’d snagged on that whirlwind shopping spree were a reasonable fit.

  Isabella had a surprisingly good feel for the shipboard routine within several hours. The children were being held in the kids’ adventure area on Deck 5. Bud and his SEALs would be glad to hear that. The female passengers weren’t allowed the run of the ship, but they had a little freedom of movement. Meals were served buffet style at 8:00 a.m. and noon. Supper had started promptly at 6:00 p.m. Women appeared to be free to go down to the meal anytime during the hour it was served.

  Although they would ideally have done another few days of surveillance to conclusively establish the routine, they didn’t have that luxury. Vanessa had made the decision to send Kat and Aleesha out to mingle with the passengers during lunch. They’d be tasked with spotting terrorists and making initial contacts with passengers or crew members who might be willing to help the Medusas. No sweat! Except Aleesha’s gut was completely tied in knots. How did that Eleanor Roosevelt quote go? Courage wasn’t the absence of fear. It was acting in spite of fear.

  Here went some courage.

  It was easy enough to ride an elevator up to Deck 9 into the heart of passenger land and blend in with the women filing quietly toward the Galaxy Restaurant. Suppressed panic choked the air. It was the same urgency of a parent in an emergency room with a gravely wounded child. Aleesha ached to reassure the women, to let them know that help was on the way, that their precious babies would be returned safely to their arms. But she dared not. The hijackers
would surely pick up on an abrupt improvement in the passengers’ morale.

  The simple meal was served buffet-style, and was surprisingly tasty, enough to actually draw her attention to it as she used eating as a cover to observe the armed guards patrolling the margins of the room. The kitchens might be operating with ten percent of their usual staff, but that staff was still composed of highly trained chefs.

  Unfortunately, the food did little to assuage the tension rippling across her shoulders. She was, for all intents and purposes, alone. Kat was here somewhere, but she was so small she’d be hard to spot in a crowd. Plus, as a sniper, she had a real talent for fading into the background, even when she was out in plain sight.

  The armed guards patrolling the room didn’t particularly unnerve Aleesha, and that was a surprise. She hadn’t realized she’d become so accustomed to the sight of weapons, nor that she’d become so proficient at looking at an armed man, instantly identifying his weaknesses and knowing how to disarm him or take him out.

  The big blond guy overbalanced too far forward on his toes. She could simply push him over and give him a good karate chop on the way down. The wiry, dark-haired guy by the kitchen entrance would be overaggressive if attacked. She’d fake a strike at him, then stand back and let the guy throw himself at her wildly. Once he’d tangled himself up in his own attack, it would be a breeze to step in and drop him.

  The tall, handsome hijacker who’d just stepped into the restaurant arrested her attention, however. He stood at the top of the steps, surveying the room as if it were his personal fief. Dark hair, dark eyes, athletic build. The fourteenth hijacker she’d seen so far. This must be the one Isabella had nicknamed Gorgeous George. The photo analyst was nicknaming each of the hijackers she spotted to keep them separate as she tried to get a firm head count.

  The terrorists had to have several men guarding the children, and they had to have a number more sleeping right now, plus Aleesha had eyed a solid dozen men strolling through here so far. Whoa. She was looking at over twenty hijackers all told if her guess was correct.

  JSOC had estimated only sixteen men. That number was in danger of being way low. She snorted. And that was why the Medusa were here, now, doing this surveillance op and getting accurate, real-time intelligence for the SEALs.

  Gorgeous George moved down onto the restaurant floor and had a quiet word with the big, blond guy, whose body language was distinctly deferential toward ol’ George. Was he the leader of the hijackers? She couldn’t imagine why the guy would show himself so freely if he was. Most times the man calling the shots in a scenario like this stayed out of the limelight. He might talk to a hostage negotiator on the phone, but he wasn’t the one who came out to do press conferences.

  Not only did Gorgeous George have a distinctly Cary Grant look about him as he moved, he didn’t exhibit any of the obvious combat weaknesses of his partners. He moved gracefully, balanced and well within himself. Hmm. Not a guy she’d want to take on in a hand-to-hand fight. A good candidate for a well-placed sniper shot because he’d be damned hard to drop in a direct attack.

  His gaze passed over her, stopped, and came back to her. Crud. He’d noticed her looking at him. She looked down hastily and tried to fade into the woodwork. Surely he was used to women ogling him. Darn it, she’d finished her meal and had no food on her plate to occupy herself with. Thankfully, a couple of the other women at the table stood up just then, gathering the dishes to carry them over to carts placed around the room. With the ship as short staffed as it was, the passengers were pitching in to help the remaining crew members keep everyone fed and the ship reasonably clean. She grabbed an armload of glasses and joined the other women in depositing the dirty dinnerware on a rolling cart.

  She turned to head for the exit and the safety of the Medusas’ room when a male voice spoke behind her. He wasn’t loud, but the hijackers allowed no idle conversation. The dining room was fairly quiet with only a murmur of female voices for him to speak over.

  “I need someone to take food up to my colleagues. Would anyone like to volunteer or shall I pick someone?”

  What first arrested Aleesha’s attention was the politeness of the British-accented inquiry. Who’d ever heard of a gentleman hijacker? The second thing that froze her in her tracks, her mind racing a mile a minute, was the opportunity his request presented. She could very possibly get a glimpse, not only of most of the remaining hijackers, but into the heart of the terrorist conspiracy itself.

  It was risky, for sure. It would draw all kinds of extra attention to herself. But it could also shorten the information-gathering process by days. What would the men do in this situation? Jack Scatalone would tell her to weigh the risks against the rewards and then do the smart thing; Wittenauer would tell her not to blow the mission; Bud Lipton would tell her she was biting off more than she could chew. Then there was Vanessa. Vanessa would tell her she trusted her team members and to use her best judgment. Fat lot of good they all were. At the end of the day, it was her neck on the line and, therefore, her call.

  And her instincts said she should go for it.

  She turned around slowly. Slowly enough to make the point that she wasn’t overeager to volunteer. Gorgeous George stood there in the flesh, all the sexier for the machine gun slung casually across his shoulder. Dang! He was even better looking up close than he was across a room, and from a distance he could stop traffic cold.

  His eyes were almost black they were such a dark brown. His hair was dark brown, too, the color of strong coffee. A few strands of silver at his temples hinted at the distinguished years to come for him. Men like him always got better looking with age. It just wasn’t fair.

  “I’ll do it,” she said quietly.

  He nodded once. “I need meals for twelve people loaded onto a rolling cart.”

  She nodded in return, as submissive a head bob as she could pull off, and reached for the empty serving cart someone had just brought out of the kitchen.

  Fingers of steel wrapped gently around her upper arm.

  “Quickly, please,” he murmured. “These guys don’t like to be kept waiting, and it’s important that they stay happy.”

  Huh? An armed hijacker was asking for her cooperation? Why didn’t he just stick his machine gun in her ribs and tell her to hop to it? In all her months of training, she’d never even heard of an op where a Tango approached the good guys and said please, let alone asked for help. Completely, totally out of character.

  Should she try to back out of this little excursion? She frowned, weighing the options fast. If she walked out of here with this guy, she might score a big intel windfall. But if she refused to go with him, he might make a fuss and draw a lot of attention to her. She could end up in serious trouble. She was unarmed, had no radio and was only generally familiar with the layout of the ship and the placement of the hijackers and hostages. She did have her fake passenger ID in her pocket, but that was a minuscule counterbalance to all the negatives. She was not prepared to find herself one-on-one with any of these guys, given how oddly this one was acting.

  She looked up at him and opened her mouth to tell him she’d changed her mind, and then their eyes met. There was something in those dark depths….

  Oh, puhlease. She didn’t buy that whole business of “I saw it in his eyes. I just knew he was okay by looking at him” crap. She was a scientist. She relied on cold, hard facts and made decisions based on logic, not gut feelings. Sure, she joked around about her voodoo intuitions, and the Medusas had even been trained to listen to their instincts if there was no factual evidence to contradict them. But she wasn’t about to let this good-looking killer throw her one look of soulful entreaty and sweep her off her feet.

  So why, then, was she letting him lead her and her cart of food toward the side exit just behind the next row of tables? Why was she walking calmly down the hall behind this guy as he motioned for her to follow him at a distance? Why was she giving an infinitesimal nod of reassurance up at the security camera a
s she passed underneath it? She was a soldier! A highly disciplined covert operator who knew how to assess risks and make cold, calm decisions under the worst of fire.

  Apparently she had, in fact, lost her mind completely, because not for a second did she actually doubt that she was going to go with this guy and find out why a hijacker was looking her in the eye in candid entreaty and saying please.

  Hal Wittenauer snatched up the phone receiver and interrupted Isabella’s latest secure-frequency radio report. “What do you mean, she just walked out with him? Where the hell did they go?”

  “They’re on the move now, sir. Traversing Golf 10 toward Golf 9.”

  The general looked over at the SEAL who was posting position reports from the ship. “Map it,” Wittenauer snapped.

  “Got it,” the SEAL replied with businesslike calm.

  Wittenauer ran a distracted hand through his hair. What in the hell was Aleesha up to? She knew better than to go in solo to the lion’s den! It was Spec Ops 101 not to do something this colossally risky. It was all well and good for the Medusas to be mavericks in training, but this was the real deal! He took a lap around the room to burn off the acid churning in his gut. And ran into Bud Lipton’s silent glare. The SEAL lieutenant commander had supported sending in the Medusas, and now, scant hours after they’d boarded the ship, one of them pulled a damn fool stunt like this. Wittenauer shoved a hand through his hair. He was going to be really ripped if he had to send in a rescue team to save the rescue team.

  “Don’t say it, Lipton,” he snapped. He didn’t even want to think about the egg he’d have on his face if the Medusas went down in flames on their first op. C’mon, ladies. Don’t do this to me.

  He whirled to the tech sergeant manning the phones. “Get me Jack Scatalone. ASAP.”