And now, Khalid thought, for the next inevitable step..
Rubens' office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland Tuesday, 0915 hours EST
"Yes, Dr. Bing," Rubens said into the telephone receiver. "We've seen it."
A wooden panel on his office wall had been opened, revealing a line of six TV monitors. All were on, now, showing the ongoing news from two CNN feeds, plus FOX, CNBC, and the major networks. One monitor now was showing a replay of the shaky footage from the Atlantis Queen, broadcast at just past eight that morning, Eastern Time. The others all showed talking heads. "It's been playing on every news channel since the transmission came through this morning," Bing said at the other end of the line. "God. CNBC already has a fancy computer-graphic logo for their special news bulletin up and running."
" Terror at Sea,'" Rubens said. "Yes. A bit on the tacky side."
"The terrorists are demanding two billion dollars plus the release of several hundred prisoners. The President has announced that we will not negotiate."
"I saw his press conference a few minutes ago," Rubens told her.
"He wants to know if your Black Cat team is still ready to go."
"It is." Rubens did not add that most of Black Cat Bravo was already on board the carrier Eisenhower; now steaming less than two hundred miles to the south of the hijacked ships. Charlie Dean was en route on board a COD C-2A — the acronym stood for Carrier On-board Delivery — flying from England to a rendezvous with the carrier in another few hours. In addition, the USS Ohio, a special forces-capable submarine transport, was on her way from Norfolk with Navy SEALs on board and an ASDS strapped to her afterdeck.
"The President still insists that the British go in first," Bing told him. "We still fully expect the SAS to be able to capture both ships. However, should they run into trouble, the President is authorizing a limited military response."
"A limited response? What the hell does that mean?"
"That we be prepared to assist British forces, but that they handle the brunt of the operation."
"Fair enough."
"The President is adamant, however, that we not risk a public relations debacle. With over three thousand hostages on board those ships, collateral damage is inevitable. We can't afford to be… to be associated with that."
Rubens managed to bite back an acid reply. It wouldn't do to antagonize ANSA, who, together with the Director of National Intelligence, was one of the NSA's two conduits to the Oval Office.
But the chronic Washingtonian ass-covering infuriated Rubens. Bing was right, of course. With a military assault on those hijacked ships, there would be "collateral damage," as she so delicately put it, almost certainly. Counter-terrorist scenarios typically assumed a minimum of 10 percent casualties among any hostages present, and for the Adantis Queen, that meant an appalling figure of over three hundred civilians killed or wounded in the assault, many of them, probably, victims of friendly fire. If the attack stalled on the way in, leaving terrorists guarding the hostages time to begin killing their prisoners, the figure would be much, much higher.
But the alternative was either paying the ransom or watching all of the hostages die if the terrorists had explosives on board those ships — and that was a near certainty. Carrousel's interrupted report had mentioned trucks in the cargo hold. That might mean as much as several tons of high explosives on board the Atlantis Queen, enough to easily sink the ship.
Enough to easily create a titanic dirty bomb with the radioactive material from the Pacific Sandpiper.
Paying the ransom, Rubens knew, would not be an option. Some of those talking heads on the TV monitors had been urging just that: give them what they want; too many lives are at stake to play macho games.
But the lesson learned from the turbulent seventies and eighties, when international terrorism had first exploded across the national consciousness, had been that giving in to terrorist demands guaranteed more terrorist demands, more hostages taken, more lives lost. If al-Qaeda thought they could bully America into paying money and freeing prisoners, they would continue to bully America in a never-ending vicious circle.
Besides, no one in either Whitehall or Washington was going to let Khalid and his people blissfully sail off with a cargo of two and a half tons of plutonium. Rogue states such as Iran and North Korea had the industrial capability to turn MOX into weapons-grade plutonium; no one wanted to see them or al-Qaeda acquire sixty atomic bombs or use the stuff with conventional explosives to spread radioactive dust clouds over Western cities. There would be a military reckoning. There was no other viable choice.
"You can tell the President that we will be most discreet," Rubens said at last, barely disguising the sarcasm. "This isn't about who gets the credit, you know. Or about who gets the blame."
"Sometimes, Bill," Bing told him, "I don't think you grasp the realities of modern global politics."
"Sometimes I'm delighted that that's the case. I would be risking my sanity otherwise."
She ignored the riposte. "Tell me about this message your people picked up yesterday."
"Your office has a copy. As does NCTC and CIA."
"Yes, but what do you make of it?"
"Our listening station at Menwith Hill picked it up about sixteen hours ago. Shortwave broadcast. It purported to be from one of the Atlantis Queen's doctors. It pretty much verifies what we already know of the situation… but adds that he saw a number of crates on an upper deck with TIM-92' stenciled on them. He thought it important enough to make a special note of it. As with Carrousel, the transmission was cut off in mid-broadcast. We haven't heard from him since."
"I was told you informed General Saunders directly."
Her voice was cold, colder than usual. God, he thought. She's going to make it into a turf war. Within the intelligence community, information was power. ANSA would see his decision to bypass the NSC, the NCTC, and the President himself as undercutting her authority.
"Actually, Dr. Bing, I told Menwith Hill to pass the information on to Saunders. It is military intelligence critical to his operation, first, and second, I thought it would help mend fences if I made sure he heard it from a British intelligence source, rather than from us. I gather Saunders is sensitive about the… relationship we have with GCHQ."
He didn't add that he doubted that Saunders would have accepted any information from an American source in the first place, or that Rubens had also transmitted the information to Lia and Akulinin in Southampton, just to be certain.
He could almost hear the wheels turning in Bing's head on the other end of the line. "That was good thinking, Bill," she said at last. "And appropriate. Just remember that the President is very concerned about the diplomatic angles of this situation. You'd be best advised to keep the NSC in the loop with all of your decisions to disseminate information. We have protocols for controlling that sort of thing."
"Of course, Dr. Bing."
"We'll talk again after Harrow Storm."
She hung up, and Rubens turned again to watch the talking heads on his wall. On NBC, a noted psychologist was discussing the sense of helpless anger within the Palestinian community that led to their feeling of betrayal and abandonment by the West.
On Rubens' computer screen, a map showed the North Atlantic, with several points marked by red and blue dots, and by thread-thin lines showing the courses of a dozen ships over the course of the past several days. The red symbol pinpointing the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper had been maintaining a steady heading of almost due west, toward America's eastern seaboard. They were now less than eighteen hundred nautical miles from New York City.
Blue symbols were closing in on the red from three directions — the Ark Royal and her consorts from the east, the Eisenhower battle group from the south, the Ohio from the west. Aircraft were shown as well, forming a ring around the hijacked vessels a hundred miles out. Two British frigates, the Campbeltown and the Sheffield, had closed to within about fifty miles of the two hijacked vessels. The rest wer
e farther out, strung out from one hundred to two hundred miles away.
"So what's your real mission, Khalid?" Rubens asked aloud. "You have to know we're "not going to let you get anywhere near the U. S. coast with that plutonium, hostages or no hostages."
If it was straight extortion — money for ships and hostages — they could have managed it with the Atlantis Queen alone and a few trucks full of high explosives. Why the added risk and complication of hijacking the Pacific Sandpiper as well?
Nor was it about hijacking the plutonium alone. The NSA had known almost immediately three days ago, on Saturday evening, when Khalid's people had begun transferring several hundred pounds of MOX from the Sandpiper to the Queen. Each large storage flask had a GPS tracking unit mounted on its casing, and each internal container had one as well; they could be tracked by satellite with superb accuracy, to within half a meter. If they tried to load even a single one of those containers onto another boat, the Agency would know and be able to track it anywhere in the world.
So this wasn't about trying to acquire plutonium for some rogue state's nuclear weapons program, either.
The Queen had radar. Khalid must know those ships and aircraft were out there.
What are you up to?
The records people at Langley had already pulled a fat dossier on Yusef Khalid, or, rather, on Rahid Sayed as-Saadi, which appeared to be his real name. As Yusef Khalid, he'd been hired by Royal Sky Line three months earlier. He'd claimed to be Egyptian, born and raised in Alexandria, and had come with sterling references, of course, including a letter from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. His excellent English — he also spoke fair German and Turkish besides both the Egyptian and Syrian dialects of Arabic — had recommended him to the cruise ship company first as a translator. His training and his first shipboard assignment, however, had been with ship's security. That was an odd anomaly that would need to be investigated.
So much for the man's legend — the intelligence community's word for his fictitious background and identity. Royal Sky Line and MI5, it seemed, simply hadn't dug deep enough.
The man whose bearded face had appeared on all of the news channels this morning had been positively matched by the CIA's Office of Image Analysis with another identity entirely — Rahid Sayed as-Saadi. Like Osama bin Laden, he was Saudi, a native of Riyadh. He might have known bin Laden at the King Abdulaziz University. He'd fought with bin Laden and other mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan and probably been in on the formation of al-Qaeda in the early 1990s. He was still wanted for questioning in regards to the first World Trade Center bombing back in 1993; he'd been photographed by the FBI in several meetings with Ramzi Yousef, who'd masterminded that attack. After 9/11, Rahid had gone first to Afghanistan, where he'd been captured by American forces at Tora Bora and questioned by the CIA… before being mysteriously released by Afghan Northern Alliance troops.
After that, he'd gone to Iraq, where he'd helped Abu Musab al-Zarqawi create the Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, better known as AQI — al-Qaeda in Iraq.
He'd been with al-Qaeda from the beginning, a member of bin Laden's inner circle. The CIA's best guess was that this Islamic Jihad International was a new operations arm for al-Qaeda.
If Rahid Sayed as-Saadi was running this show, it was very big, and very deadly.
What are you really up to, you bastard? Rubens asked again.
Kleito's Temple, Atlantis Queen 48deg Or N, 39deg 09' W Tuesday, 1550 hours GMT
"So we're agreed?" Andrew McKay said.
The others sitting around the table with him nodded. Most of them looked scared. Some looked defiant. A few — like the Hollywood agent Jake Levy — looked numb.
"Not all of us," Dr. Barnes replied.
"I knew we'd been hijacked as soon as those men came to our stateroom yesterday," Adrian Bollinger said, grim. Tabitha Sandberg, sitting next to him and holding his hand, nodded. "They were looking for that woman who came in over our balcony, and they meant business. They hit me in the face with a rifle butt when I told them to get the hell out of my cabin, and they threatened to rape Tabby. If there's any way off of this hell-ship…"
"Yeah, well, we all heard the PA announcement from the bridge yesterday," Reggie Carmichael said. "We all know the score, right? We know we're all gonna die if we don't do something!"
"They have Gillian," Levy said, "and they have Bernie… "
"Gillian and Bernie? Who are they?" Donald Myers wanted to know.
"Arnold Bernstein and Gillian Harper," Carmichael said. "Bernie is her manager." When Myers looked blank and gave a slight negative shake to his head, Carmichael added, "Gillian Harper? The hottest MTV star ever?
'Livin' Large'? Platinum labels and music video hits out the ass?"
"Sorry," Myers said. "Never heard of her."
"Jesus! Where've you been, man? Kansas?"
"Baltimore."
"Enough!" McKay said. "Keep it down, all of you!" He glanced around the room, trying to peer past the clumps of tropical vegetation and faux Mayan ruins. There didn't appear to be any of them in the Deck Eleven lounge, but he didn't want to take the chance of being overheard, or of attracting attention. Too much was at stake.
Barnes, the ship's doctor, took a sip of his drink. "The ship has been taken by terrorists," he said. "They are well armed, and preparing to fight off any attempt by the military to retake the ship. But it still might be that our best bet is to hunker down and wait this out."
"I am getting my wife and child off of this ship, Doctor," McKay said. "The sooner the better!"
He'd left Nina with Melissa back in the stateroom. He looked at the others around the table, trying to assess their spirit.
"How about a show of hands?" Stephen Penrose asked. "Everyone who thinks we should steal a lifeboat and get the hell off this ship, raise your hand!"
Of the fourteen people around the large table, eleven voted yes.
"We can't decide something like this democratically," Barnes said. He'd not raised his hand. "My duty is here, looking after the passengers and crew. But I'll help you if I can."
"I can't go," Levy said. "They have Gillian!"
"Yeah, Jake? And maybe you want to join the bitch, wherever she is," Carmichael said.
"Listen," Donald Myers said. He'd not voted, either, but he seemed unsure. "I've got a whole bunch of people in my tour group. Can we bring them?"
"How many?" McKay asked.
"Nineteen total," Myers replied. "Fourteen women, four men… and myself."
"That's the Baltimore tour group?" Barnes asked him.
"Yes."
Barnes shook his head. "Most of them are elderly," he said. "One's using a walker, isn't she? I think their chances are better here, not bobbing around in a rough ocean for God knows how long before a ship picks you up."
"I don't think that's a good idea," McKay said. "The fewer people in our party, the better, y'know? And we don't want to be held back by walkers and arthritis."
Myers nodded. "I understand."
"You're welcome to come."
He shook his head. "No. I need to stay with my people."
"It'll just be the eleven of us, then," McKay said. "That's a good number. Johnny, here, can use his key to lower one of the lifeboats. We pile in, lower away, and let the ship sail over the horizon. Then we use the emergency transmitter on board to call for help. You know the military's going to be listening to every frequency."
"It'll be rough," Berger warned. He was a ship's steward whom McKay had met and talked with several days ago. Berger had been instrumental in helping get this group of men and women together, passing messages and cell-phone numbers and getting them into the Kleito Lounge for this meeting. "Lifeboats aren't supposed to be dropped into the water when we're moving."
"How fast are we moving?" Penrose asked.
"I'm not sure," Berger said. "Eighteen, maybe twenty knots. Our top speed is closer to twenty-five, but we're dragging the Sandpiper alongside, so we haven't
been going at our absolute max."
"We'll have to chance it," Bollinger said.
"If we release the davits just before we hit the water," Berger added, "it'll be a jolt, but it shouldn't be any rougher than an amusement park water ride, right?"
"We'll do what we have to do," McKay said. "This is about survival."
"How long will we have to wait before someone picks us up?" Sandberg asked.
"Probably not too long," Barnes told her. "My guess is that the military will be putting together a takedown as we speak. You'll be spotted pretty quick."
"If they get us soon enough, we can tell them what we know about the terrorists," Carmichael suggested. "They'll have us all on TV!"
"First things first," McKay said. "First we get off the ship. We worry about press conferences later."
And in hushed voices, they began to discuss the details of their escape.
Bridge, Atlantis Queen
47deg 56' N, 40deg 38' W
Tuesday, 1810 hours GMT
"Amir!" Jamel Hijazi shouted from the radar display. "They're coming!"
Khalid walked over to the display, which was set now to show everything around the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper out to a radius of 120 nautical miles. The display used computers to integrate the data from several radars mounted on the mast above and behind the bridge in order to show both surface and air targets. Two surface targets had been dogging their wake for two days, now, very slowly closing to a range of less than fifty miles. Their IFF codes had been changed so that the Queen's computers couldn't identify them, but Khalid suspected they were a pair of British destroyers or frigates. Military aircraft were circling a hundred miles out.
But something new had appeared on the display… a tiny double chevron of bright green dots, four in front, four close behind, coming straight toward the Queen and the Sandpiper at 150 knots. Helicopters.
"Tell Ibrahim to stand ready," Khalid said, "and to wait for my signal."
As Hijazi picked up the intercom handset and began speaking rapidly into it, Khalid watched the approaching targets, nodding. It begins…
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