Sea Of Terror (2010)

by Stephen - Deep Black 08 Coonts

  The guard said something and Tricia laughed

  Bridge, Atlantis Queen

  North Atlantic 47deg 59' N, 18deg 14' W Sunday, 1730 hours GMT

  Khalid leaned over the electronic chart table and drew the line again, just to be certain. He nodded, satisfied, then looked up at Aziz. "Is everything ready?"

  "Yes, Amir." He nodded toward the bridge window. On the Atlantis Queen's forward deck, two lonely figures stood next to the starboard side railing. "As you ordered."

  "Bring him here, then."

  Aziz left the bridge and returned a few moments later, leading Phillips at gunpoint. He watched the captain's eyes as the man saw him standing next to the chart, saw those eyes widen ever so slightly. He's afraid. Good.. ..

  "Perhaps, Captain, you would be so good as to explain something to me."

  "Perhaps you would tell me what you are doing with my people! Your thugs just came up and dragged Jason out of the wardroom."

  "First, Captain," Khalid snapped, "you will tell me why you tampered with the compass this morning!"

  "I... I told you. It needed to be calibrated."

  Khalid sighed. "Captain Phillips ... do I look stupid? Or do you simply assume Arabs don't understand technology?" He touched a control on the chart table, and a yellow line drew itself across the curve of the Earth's globe, sliding just south of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the hook of Cape Cod, before coming to a halt a few miles south of Long Island and the entrance to New York Harbor. "This is the course I ordered you to set."

  He touched the control again and drew a second line, one that diverged slightly from the first, to the north, a line that diverged farther and farther as the miles slipped past until it came to a halt smack against the coastline of Newfoundland, well to the north of Cape Race.

  "And this is the course you recalibrated for us this morning. Do you notice a difference in our destination?"

  Phillips said nothing, his jaw tightening.

  "Did you think I would fail to notice, Captain? Your change would have put us over a hundred miles too far north. Were you planning some sort of distraction, to keep us from realizing you were attempting to run these ships aground?"

  "Please, Amir Khalid," Phillips said. His voice quavered just a bit. "Please. I'm afraid that. .. that you intend to use these ships as a weapon, somehow. An attack on New York City. If that's true, my passengers and crew are dead no matter what."

  Khalid seemed to consider this. "Come here," he said after a moment. "Look out the window. What do you see?"

  Phillips looked out over the forward deck. Hijazi had the prisoner on his knees, facing away from him, his hands zip-stripped behind his back. "Who ... who is that?"

  "That is one of your helmsmen, Captain. Jason Miller. He was at the wheel, I believe, when you changed the compass."

  Khalid pulled a handheld radio from a belt holster, pressed the send key, and said something in Arabic.

  "Wait!" Phillips said. "Please--"

  A sharp crack sounded from outside, the shot slightly muffled by distance and the glass. Jason Miller flopped forward, striking the ship's railing, then slumped back in an untidy huddle at his executioner's feet. The gunman slung his AK, then proceeded to lift Miller's body up, press it against the railing, and topple it over and into the sea far below.

  "You murderer!" Phillips snarled, turning suddenly from the bloody scene. Several of Khalid's men on the bridge stepped forward, weapons coming up.

  "Do you wish to die as well, Captain?"

  Phillips stopped in mid-stride, his fists clenched, breathing hard.

  "If you wish, I will kill you as well, and bring your second in command up here in your place." His head cocked to one side. "Or... it may even be that I don't need you any longer. The ship continues to run smoothly and well. It will be simple enough to get it back on its proper course." He paused, as though thinking about it. "I choose to let you live for the moment, Captain," he said at last. "I may have need of you when we reach New York."

  Reaching for a small device in a second holster on his belt, he extracted a handheld GPS receiver. "I have my own means of determining our position, Captain. And I can easily compare this with the numbers on your various instruments here. I can read a map, and some of my people are quite good with computers.

  "In short, Captain Phillips, this operation has been most carefully planned and orchestrated. We know what we are doing. Do not attempt to trick me again! Do you understand?"

  Phillips said nothing.

  "I said, do you understand? Or shall I bring another member of your crew onto the forward deck? How many must I shoot before you obey me?"

  "All right! All right! I understand!"

  "Good." He looked at Aziz and jerked his head. "Take him back to his room," he said in Arabic.

  When Phillips was gone, Khalid stood for a moment looking out over the ocean. Five more days and then it would be over. It was going to be hard keeping the majority of the crew and passengers ignorant of what was happening .. . and sooner or later they would find out or figure it out, and then it would be a matter of keeping them all cowed.

  Just five more days ...

  And then none of it would matter anymore.

  Chapter 18

  National Security Council

  White House basement

  Washington, D. C.

  Monday, 1030 hours EST

  "the president," dr. bing said, "was most emphatic. Both ships belong to Great Britain. The problem is theirs as well."

  Rubens' jaw tightened, and he made an effort to keep his voice calm. "Madam Chairperson," he said, "I cannot stress this enough. That decision is shortsighted and it is wrong. If I could just have ten minutes with the President--"

  "That is not going to happen, Mr. Rubens," Bing told him, and the tone of her voice had the finality of a slamming door. "He was very clear on the matter."

  "London has indicated that they are ready to go in with an SAS assault sometime tonight," George Wehrum added. "We will support their operation by sharing intelligence, by providing logistical support, and by making available ships and helicopters to evacuate crew members and passengers from those vessels and to provide medical support when and if that becomes necessary."

  "How are you going to evacuate over three thousand people in the middle of the North Atlantic?" Rubens asked. He looked around the room, trying to gauge the mood of the rest of the people at the conference table. It was crowded here, more crowded than it had been on Saturday morning.

  "By aircraft carrier, of course," Wehrum said. "The Ark Royal is in pursuit of the target vessels now. And the USS Eisenhower--she was en route from Norfolk to the Med--she's been redirected and should rendezvous with the British squadron within twenty-four hours."

  "What, are you planning on building a tent city on the Ike's flight deck?" Admiral Prendergast asked, his tone sarcastic and possibly angry as well. Rubens wondered if the order to the Eisenhower had bypassed Prendergast on the way down.

  "If necessary," Bing told him. "However, it almost certainly will not be necessary. The SAS is very, very good at what they do."

  Rubens could only shake his head. While an aircraft carrier was big enough to carry several thousand people-- the Eisenhower had a complement of over fifty-six hundred--it would be an absolute nightmare trying to house, feed, and care for the needs of thousands of civilians as well. And that didn't even begin to address his original question, which was how the Navy would get those civilians off of the Atlantis Queen and onto the Eisenhower in the first place. They would not be able to transfer directly, not without risking a lot of damage to both ships. Personnel could be transferred by helicopter, but there would be only a few of those available, and each could carry only a handful of people--perhaps twelve to fifteen--at a time.

  There was also a serious logistical question. If the Eisenhower's flight deck was covered with refugees, there wouldn't be room to handle flight operations--and there would be no place for the necessary small fleet
of helicopters to land. No wonder Prendergast was pissed.

  Of course, Bing was right in one respect. It probably wouldn't be necessary to evacuate the Atlantis Queen.

  Either the SAS assault would be successful and the cruise ship secured ... or the terrorists on board would push a button and blow her up.

  There was also the question of the Pacific Sandpiper and her deadly cargo. The terrorists must be planning on using the plutonium somehow, if only as a bargaining chip.

  "What about the Pacific SandpiperT General Barton said, as if he'd just read Rubens' mind. "Suppose the terrorists are using the nuclear material on board to make a bomb?"

  "I believe Dr. Cavenaugh has a report on that issue," Bing said. "Doctor?"

  Dr. Bruce Cavenaugh was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and served as an advisor on nuclear threats both to the NCTC and to Homeland Security. A rumpled man in a tweed jacket, the very image of an elderly professor, Cavenaugh stood to address the group, moving around to the lectern at the front of the room with a double handful of notes and folders before him.

  "We've been reviewing the possibilities," he told the group, "given PNTL's cargo manifest for the Pacific Sandpiper While it's been widely reported that the ship carries enough plutonium to manufacture as many as fifty or sixty nuclear weapons, there is almost no chance at all that terrorists on board those two ships could create such a weapon themselves. For a nuclear explosion to be generated, two sub-critical masses of plutonium must be brought together very suddenly and very precisely. This requires precision tooling, and a means of reshaping the plutonium elements to achieve maximum effect. Usually, this means two hemispheres--imagine a ball cut in half--positioned so that conventional explosives slam the two halves together." He brought his hands together in a sharp clap, and several people at the table jumped slightly. "They achieve critical mass, and a nuclear explosion is the result. A second method is to machine a sphere of plutonium with a precisely drilled hole into which a plutonium cylinder is fired. A third would be to have one sphere of plutonium positioned inside a larger, hollow sphere, with conventional explosives around the outside to create a powerful implosion.

  "But the plutonium on board the Pacific Sandpiper is carefully packaged in one-hundred-ton canisters bolted to the cargo hold deck, in such a way that the plutonium always remains sub-critical. It might be possible to use cutting torches to remove the storage containers inside each canister, true, but the plutonium is stored as plutonium oxide, an extremely fine powder. The terrorists simply don't have the facilities to transform that powder into pure, solid plutonium. If they slapped a critical mass of plutonium oxide together, the worst that would happen would be the release of a tremendous amount of heat.. . enough heat to melt through the bottom of the ship and sink her... what became known as the 'China syndrome' back in the 1980s. There would be extensive contamination of the sea in the ship's immediate vicinity, of course, but no explosion."

  Rubens could feel the others at the table relaxing. Since the beginning of his crisis, the major concern had been that terrorists were attempting to seize the Sandpiper in order to either gain access to enough plutonium to make atomic bombs or threaten the United States with the possibility of a nuclear explosion.

  "Dr. Cavenaugh," he said. "What about the possibility of a dirty bomb?"

  "Ah! Yes. That is one possibility we've been looking at that does appear to pose a very real threat in this situation. The plutonium oxide is already in a fine powder form, as I said. If it were to be removed from its protective containers, a sufficiently powerful conventional explosion--an explosion big enough to destroy the ship, say--might hurl most of that powder into the atmosphere, where prevailing winds would carry it out over a large footprint. Any ships downwind of the explosion would be contaminated."

  "Then we will recommend that our British friends stay well upwind during their assault," Bing said.

  "How big of a footprint, Doctor?" Debra Collins wanted to know.

  "That depends on wind speed, humidity, and several other factors," Cavenaugh replied. "But potentially five or six hundred miles long, perhaps fifty to one hundred miles wide."

  "Enough," Rubens said, looking squarely at Bing, "to blanket all of Manhattan and Long Island with radioactive dust, if they blow that ship up inside New York Harbor. That is what I want to be certain the President understands. Those ships changed course thirty-six hours ago, and are on a heading that appears to be aimed straight at Boston or at New York City, or, if they come further down the coast, Philadelphia or Washington, D. C. Our crisis assessment team at the NSA believes the enemy's target to be either Boston--it's the closest major city on the new course--or New York City.

  "Right now, the Sandpiper and her cargo are nineteen hundred nautical miles from New York. That's four days at the speed they've been traveling since Saturday night. That makes it our problem as well as the Brits'."

  Bing shifted uncomfortably in her chair but said, "The President has already been fully informed, and it is his decision that this situation be resolved by the British."

  "We have a special operations unit ready to go in," Rubens said, "on twenty minutes' notice, but they will need approximately twelve hours to redeploy to the Eisenhower Once there, however, they would be available to provide special combat intelligence to the SAS commander on-site."

  Bing appeared to consider this, then shook her head. "The President has decided that this situation will be resolved by the British."

  Rubens heard the warning in Bing's voice and in the way she kept repeating her words: do not push. The harder he fought to have the NSA's combat action team included in the assault, the more deeply entrenched and stubborn Bing and her cronies would become.

  He wondered, though, if the President really was dead set against U. S. forces participating in the op ... or if this was Bing's way of defending her turf. Whichever it was, Bing had just slammed the door shut on Rubens, or she thought she had.

  He was not willing to concede the victory to Bing and Wehrum, however, not yet. Rubens had tremendous respect for the British SAS. They were well trained and battle-tested. Some claimed they were the equals in most respects of the U. S. Delta Force.

  But Rubens knew too well that no combat op ever goes down exactly the way it was planned, and if the hijacking of those two ships was the prelude to a terrorist nuclear attack against the U. S. East Coast, he wanted to have all of Desk Three's available combat assets on the scene and ready to go.

  Just in case.

  Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen 48deg 32' N, 27deg 19' W Monday, 1640 hours, GMT

  Carolyn Howorth carefully stepped up to the door, pressing her face against the tiny window in order to see as much of the passageway beyond as she possibly could. For two days, now, yesterday and today, she'd been "skulking," as she'd described it in her reports back to GCHQ, slipping through the huge cruise ship passageways and access corridors in an attempt to garner every scrap of information she could on the paramilitary force that appeared now to be in total control of the Atlantis Queen.

  In some thirty-six hours of skulking, she'd learned quite a bit. The hijackers appeared to be Arabic speakers, though she'd heard some speak English--including a few with no trace of an accent. She'd actually seen at least twelve different men but suspected there were others she'd not seen--up on the bridge, in the Security Office one deck down, and in places like engineering and the ship's holds, all of which were barred to anyone without a properly programmed key card.

  Two guards stood outside the doors leading to the ship's Neptune Theater at all times, and she'd watched other guards escort bound crew personnel and passengers through those doors and emerge again without them. The theater, then, was a secure holding area for people the terrorists needed to take out of circulation, quite possibly because they'd seen or guessed something they shouldn't have. She hadn't been able to find a way in, yet, to see how many people had been taken there, but the traffic suggested that the number was fairly high. There were
probably several terrorists inside the theater as well, keeping an eye on the prisoners.

  She'd come up the forward stairwell hoping to see if there was a way to get to the Ship's Security Office. The place was sure to be guarded, she thought, but if she could get inside, she might be able to learn a bit more about the size and disposition of the hijackers' force.

  It was the Ship's Security systems that worried her most. The Adantis Queen was enormous, with mile upon mile of corridors, maintenance tunnels, and compartments that guaranteed that she could move around the ship unseen, if the hijackers weren't watching the Ship's Security cam screens, and if they didn't know how to use the onboard tracking system. According to Llewellyn's description of the system Friday night, passengers carrying key cards or the small tags with their embedded computer chips could be tracked by sensors inside the bulkheads. Worse, passengers without cards or tags could still be sensed--and a warning flashed to the Security Office that someone was wandering where she shouldn't without her ID.

  She'd elected to carry her ID tag with her, on the assumption that with it, she was just one of some three thousand colored blips on the security monitor screens, and so might be overlooked even if she was now on the Eleventh Deck where she had no right to be, officially. If the sensors picked up a warm body moving in a restricted area with no ID, an alarm would sound, and that would bring the bad guys down on her like an avalanche.

  The terrorists, clearly, had circumvented the security system somehow and were traveling everywhere-through the ship with impunity. The question was--were they using the ship's sophisticated security systems to monitor and control their hostages?

  Through the tiny door window, Howorth could just see the security checkpoint in the passageway beyond and to her right, a sealed massive steel door with a card reader and a thumbprint scanner set in the bulkhead to one side. There were no guards as there were one deck up, in front of the security door leading to the bridge and radio room. She put her hand on the door handle to open it, then ducked back when she heard the boom of another door closing somewhere down the passageway to her left. A shadow passed the window, and when she edged closer to look, she caught a glimpse of a uniformed man pressing his thumb to the scanner plate, then opening the door to the Security Department.