Sea Of Terror (2010)

by Stephen - Deep Black 08 Coonts

  "We wondered," the Sandberg woman had said. "All those men with guns ..."

  "They're going to be coming down here in just a second," she told them. "You never saw me, okay? They'll think I fell into the sea."

  "But where are you going?" Bollinger had asked. "You can't just--"

  "I can and I will," she'd said, opening the cabin door and checking both ways outside. "Remember! You haven't seen anyonel"

  Bollinger turned and locked the glass sliding door. "We haven't seen a soul."

  Howorth had made her way to a service stairway, then, and gone down one more deck: Most of the staterooms on Deck Four didn't have balconies like the one she'd scrambled onto on Deck Five, because that space was taken up by long lines of lifeboats slung from davits.

  A door opened onto the Deck Four starboard promenade, which gave her access to the lifeboats. She'd been hiding in Number 5 ever since, eating emergency rations and making herself comfortable on a jury-rigged mattress of life jackets and blankets. She needed time to think, and consider her next move.

  Howorth had to assume that Mitchell and Ghailiani both were dead ... though she wasn't sure about the Moroccan crewman. She'd seen him drop to the deck when the gunmen broke in, but she hadn't seen bullets ripping him open like they had Mitchell, who'd caught a full burst through the splintering door. It might, she thought, be a good idea to assume Ghailiani was not dead but in terrorist hands. Did he know anything about her that might help the enemy? Other than the fact of the two of them, her and Mitchell, Ghailiani didn't know much at all.

  Her ID card had been on the bedside table in her cabin. The terrorists would have it now. With luck, they'd checked out Bollinger's cabin and assumed she'd fallen into the ocean. The only way they could spot her now was if she wandered into a restricted area of the ship, one with sensors that would pick up her movement and body heat. If she stayed in those parts of the ship open to passengers, she thought, she ought to be okay.

  Her computer was gone, hurled into the sea to keep the terrorists from getting it. She was out of touch with her headquarters. Briefly she'd considered going down to Connexions in the Deck One mall and using one of those computers to contact GCHQ, but she'd swiftly dropped that idea. She'd seen them capture one man there--Mitchell's partner--and if those computers were still online, the terrorists up in the computer center would be watching them for activity.

  By transmitting the little she and Mitchell had been able to discover so far before the gunmen had burst in on them, she'd probably done all she could. The trouble was, Carolyn Howorth wanted to do more, and she couldn't do it while hiding in a damned lifeboat.

  Then the helicopters had flown up the Queen's starboard side, missiles had lashed out from one of the upper decks and slapped one of the aircraft into the sea, and she'd heard a thunderous boom from the other side of the ship. Quickly she'd scrambled out of the lifeboat and found service stairs going up. She reached Deck Nine and headed aft, entering the Pyramid Club Casino. Alone, she would invite suspicion, or simply harassment by any terrorists who might see her. In a group, she could blend in. Each time she'd been there, there'd been passengers in the Pyramid Club, sometimes lots of them.

  Attendance in the casino was way down this afternoon, but there were people. None were playing at any of the tables, however. They seemed stunned by the sudden, brief battle with the helicopters. Outside, by the Atlas Pool, two armed terrorists watched the distant helicopters circle far out over the sea.

  She spotted one man sitting alone at the bar, a nerdy-looking sort with heavy-rimmed glasses and a distracted expression. Then she took a second look. He had a laptop computer on the bar in front of him and was hard at work typing at the keyboard.

  A computer was definitely promising. She walked over to the bar and sat down next to him.

  "What," she asked, "are you doing?"

  "Huh? Oh. Coding."

  "Coding what?"

  He nodded toward a kind of kiosk at the rear of the casino, not far from the sliding doors. She blinked. The kiosk encircled a vaguely humanoid figure, a woman's figure complete with a plunging neckline between large plastic breasts, robotic arms, and an eerie face on a TV monitor mounted where the head should have been.

  "That," he said. "Rosie."

  She'd read something about the machine in a brochure in the travel package they'd handed her at Southampton. "That's the card-playing robot?" she asked. "The one that plays blackjack?"

  "The one and only."

  "Um... I don't know how to say this, exactly," she said carefully, "but you do know we've been captured by hijackers, yes?"

  "Of course. We all heard the announcement."

  "So why are you doing that?

  He stopped typing and looked up, looked around, then looked at her. "We need guns," he said, his voice low, a conspiratorial whisper, "A way to fight back! Maybe Rosie can help us get one. She's very strong."

  "How? She doesn't look very . .. mobile."

  "She's not. She's bolted to the deck." He started typing again.

  "By the way, I'm Janet Carroll," Howorth told him.

  "Jerry Esterhausen."

  "Listen ... I know it's a lot to ask, but can you connect with the ship's Internet with that thing?"

  "Of course. It has a built-in router."

  "Jerry," Carolyn said, lowering her voice in a deliberately and sexually provocative manner, "you and I need to talk!"

  Forward Deck, Atlantis Queen 47deg 28' N, 42deg 16' W Tuesday, 2001 hours GMT

  "The attack by unknown helicopters appears to have been beaten off," Sandra Ames said, speaking earnestly into the microphone as the freshening wind caught and tousled her blond hair. "We don't have any more details at the time, but at least one helicopter was shot down by missiles fired from the Atlantis Queen's upper decks, and at least two more were damaged. The rest of the helicopters-- witnesses said they saw between five and ten additional helicopters off the ship's stern at one point--appear to have left the area."

  The three of them, Fred Doherty, James Petrovich, and Sandra Ames, were standing on the forward deck under the watchful and dispassionate gaze of one of the terrorist gunmen. They were losing light fast. Doherty wasn't sure what time zone they were in right now, so he didn't know the local time, but the sun was approaching the horizon in a blaze of sunset color and gilded clouds astern.

  "Amir Yusef Khalid, the leader of the terrorist group, gave this news team permission--it was more of an order, really--to come outside onto the ship's forward deck and film this report. I don't know what--wait. Amir Khalid has just come out onto the deck. Perhaps he has something to say to us on-air...."

  Fred Doherty turned and looked aft, toward the ship's superstructure. A grim-faced Khalid had just emerged onto the forward promenade. Behind him were two of his thugs carrying AK-47 rifles, and an older man, his hands bound behind his back. At the sight of the civilian passenger, Doherty felt a sharp chill that was not due to the wind.

  They marched the civilian up to the ship's railing and forced him to his knees, facing out to sea. With the camera rolling, without any preamble at all, Khalid pulled an automatic pistol from his belt and stepped up behind the prisoner. The passenger sensed the movement and started struggling, but the guards kept his arms pinned. Khalid brought the pistol up to the base of the man's skull and pulled the trigger.

  Ames screamed as the sharp crack of the gunshot echoed back off the ship's superstructure. "Oh, my God, no!" Petrovich said. The passenger pitched forward into the railing and slumped to the deck, blood pooling beneath his head.

  Khalid turned and stalked toward the camera, eyes burning with a ferocity Doherty had not seen before. Glaring into the camera, Khalid pointed back over his shoulder at the body as the two thugs lifted it between them, balanced it upright for a moment against the rail, then heaved it over the side. "That," Khalid said, "was one of the ship's passengers. His name was Arnold Bernstein, of Los Angeles, California. You--the governments in Washington and in London--may ta
ke comfort in the fact that we of the Islamic Jihad International Brigade are merciful and did not kill every man, woman, and child onboard this vessel tonight as a result of your idiotic posturing and chest-thumping! Attempt another such attack, however, and over thirty-three hundred more people will die!

  "We know you have two warships closing with us. Those ships are to keep their distance. Come no closer than twenty miles with any ship or aircraft to the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper, or we shall begin killing more passengers!"

  Khalid turned suddenly and walked away, back toward the ship's superstructure. "And cut," Doherty said quietly.

  Beside him, Sandra Ames quietly muttered, "That fucking raghead son of a bitch."

  He'd never heard her use that kind of language before.

  Chapter 22

  Pyramid Club Casino, Atlantis Queen North Atlantic Ocean 47deg 01' N, 44deg 56' W Wednesday, 0034 hours GMT

  "there we go," esterhausen said. "You can send your e-mail now, and the terrorists up in IT won't have a clue."

  "Excellent!" Howorth said. "You slowed down the packet rate, you said?"

  "Yes." The man was almost preening, quite proud of his computer savvy. Howorth knew her way around computers and IT networks as well, but she'd reined herself in as she'd talked with Esterhausen, asking pertinent questions and making suggestions, but letting him think he was doing most of the work./It was, after all, his computer, and she needed access if she was going to pull this off. She had the impression that he didn't often have the opportunity to show off to people. Especially to girls.

  "My wireless card can connect with the ship's Intranet, of course," he continued, "but anyone monitoring the network up in the ship's IT department would know if we tried sending a message out. I've got pretty good encryption--they wouldn't know what you were saying-- but they'd be alerted that someone on board was talking with the shore. But by slowing the transmission rate way, way down, they won't see it in IT. It'll look like routine background traffic."

  "Perfect! That's wonderful, Jerry. Thank you!" She checked her watch. It was just past midnight-thirty back home. The two of them had been at this all evening, bent over Esterhausen's laptop. They'd moved from the bar to a booth some hours ago, to give themselves a bit more privacy.

  The hour didn't matter. They would pick up her message both at GCHQ and at Fort Meade, middle of the night or not. She started typing.

  "So what is this important e-mail you need to send, anyway? What are you trying to do? You said you worked for the government.. . ."

  "I do. The less you know about it, the better."

  "What, MI5?" His eyes lit up. "MI6?"

  That reminded her of Mitchell, and it hurt. "No. Like I said, the less you know, the better. As to what I'm doing .. . have you ever heard of a drive-by download?"

  His brow furrowed above the heavy black frame of his glasses. "Uh, no. I don't think I have."

  "I'm hoping the tangos on the bridge haven't, either," she said. "And if they don't know we're transmitting down here in the first place, the surprise will be that much sweeter. . . ."

  National Security Council White House basement Washington, D. C. Wednesday, 1010 hours EST

  "Leon Klinghoffer," Debra Collins said. "Who is that?" Donna Bing asked. "A passenger on the cruise ship Achille Lauro" Rubens told them. "An old man in a wheelchair, murdered by the terrorists when they took over the ship in 1985. They shot him in the head and in the chest, then forced a couple of the ship's crew to throw the body and the wheelchair overboard."

  "The news media is playing up that angle," Collins added. "Bernstein was Jewish, like Klinghoffer."

  "Is that why they killed him?" Bing wanted to know. She sounded horrified. "Because he was Jewish!"

  "Of course," Gene Carter, one of the regular NSC members, said. "Terrorists have sequestered Jewish hostages before, and threatened to kill them first. Entebbe is a case in point."

  "It's possible, I suppose," Rubens said. "Mostly, though, I think Khalid just wanted to send a message to show he was serious. Bernstein might have just been a convenient, random target. It is true, though, that the terrorists appear to have access to Ship's Security records on the passengers. They might have identified Bernstein from those."

  "The.. . public aspect of this crisis is getting out of hand," Wehrum pointed out. "FOX has trotted out the Achille Lauro affair, pointing out the similarities with the Atlantis Queen, and is doing these damned man-on-the-street interviews with people saying we have to go in and kick Khalid's ass." He glanced at Bing, who gave him a sharp look. "Sorry."

  "It's true," Thomas Elton said. He was a small, prissy man, the NSC's liaison with the State Department. "The other networks are starting to take it up as well. With this ... this cold-blooded murder airing on every news channel over and over, people are wondering why we're not doing something about the situation."

  "They're starting to look at Reagan and his response to the Achille Lauro hijacking," Wehrum said. "They want the President to do something."

  "Maybe he should," Rubens said.

  "The Achille Lauro hijacking," Bing said carefully, "was resolved without bloodshed. Without more bloodshed, I should say. We didn't go in all guns blazing. The Egyptians negotiated with the terrorists, and they went ashore peacefully. Reagan's response was to force the suspects' plane down in Sicily, and precipitate an international incident."

  "With respect," Rubens said, "the Atlantis Queen crisis really has very few similarities to the Achille Lauro. None at all, actually, except that both hijackings involved cruise ships.

  "In fact, the PLF terrorists who took over the Achille Lauro weren't intending to hijack the ship at all. There were only four terrorists on board--some sources suggest there were two others who stayed in the background-- and they apparently were using the ship as a staging platform for launching a raid on Israel from the sea. A ship's steward spotted their cache of weapons and explosives, though, they panicked, and they took over the ship. They threatened to blow the ship up unless fifty Palestinians being held in Israel were released, but everyone involved knew that wasn't going to happen. When Syria . Refused to let the ship dock at Tartus, they were stuck. A classic example of a full-blown clusterfuck."

  "Mr. Rubens, please," Bing said.

  He shrugged. "The Egyptians did negotiate, or they pretended to, and the terrorists went free at Port Said, supposedly before anyone ashore knew about Klinghoffer's murder. They, and the mastermind of the operation, Abu Abbas, got on a seven-thirty-seven headed for Libya. At Reagan's orders, the plane was intercepted by F-fourteens and forced to land in Sicily.

  "This situation is different on almost every level. This time, the terrorists clearly targeted both the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper from the start. The operation was large--Carrousel estimates at least twenty hijackers on board the Queen, and a similar but unknown number on the Sandpiper It was well armed, their weapons including a number of Stinger shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles and, we're guessing, several tons at least of high explosives smuggled onto the ship at Southampton. It was well equipped, including a helicopter. And it was superbly planned. The op included the suborning of at least one of the security officers on board the Queen, the murder and replacement of two Japanese nationals on board the Sandpiper,; and the replacement or the suborning of at least one of the crewmen on board the Ishikari."

  "How do you know that last?" Wehrum asked.

  "Because of the timing. The destruction of the Ishikari was deliberate, timed to allow a helicopter full of terrorists to touch down on the Sandpiper and take her over just before the Queen arrived in the area. The tangos have been carrying out this plan of theirs step by step by meticulous step ... and they've been staying one step ahead of us the whole way."

  "So what are you suggesting, Mr. Rubens?" Bing asked him.

  "First, that we not allow the perceived similarities of this situation with the Achille Lauro hijacking to deter us," he said. "Second, that we pay attentio
n to something important--the fact that, whatever Khalid claims, the tangos aren't simply holding the crew and passengers of the Queen for ransom. They didn't need to take over the Pacific Sandpiper for that. So we can assume they have something bigger in mind. Something flashier."

  "New York City," General Barton said. "A huge dirty bomb in New York Harbor."

  "That seems the likeliest possibility right now," Collins said. "The IJI Brigade is almost certainly aligned with al-Qaeda, and might be an operational branch of it. Al-Qaeda always goes for big, spectacular operations with high body counts. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing . .. which was supposed to bring down both towers and release a cloud of poison gas, though that part isn't generally well known. Operation Bojinka, which was discovered and stopped before it could be carried out--the simultaneous hijacking and destruction of ten or twelve commercial aircraft over the Pacific Ocean. The attack on the USS Cole off Yemen. The embassy bombings in East Africa. The nine-eleven attacks. Typical al-Qaeda operations don't have religious overtones, and they don't demand ransom money or the release of hostages. They're designed to punish the West for supporting Israel or for acting as 'oppressors,' And they're designed to grab world attention and hold it."

  "Maybe this is a first time for ransom demands," Bing suggested. "Al-Qaeda might need money. We've been putting the squeeze on them by seizing their assets every time we can identify them."

  "Or it might not be al-Qaeda after all," Wehrum added.

  "Or the demand for two billion dollars and the release of Muslim prisoners might be nothing but a smokescreen," Rubens said, "a means of spinning things out, to let the hijacked ships get close enough to a U. S. city to do some serious damage."

  Bing considered this. "The President is still... reluctant to authorize military action against the hijackers," she said. "But he also says that the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper must not be allowed to enter American waters. To prevent that, he will authorize deadly force against both ships."