Sea of Terror (24 page)

"Quit bitching, boss," Petrovich said. "Carter said he wanted her to get more exposure!"

"Yeah, but I think he meant something we could air on TV."

"Not a problem. It^ll be late-night airtime. We'll just drop some pixilation over her titties. Blur 'em right out."

There were a handful of other sunbathers, and two or three other women had gone topless as well. It was not unusual, Doherty knew, for cruise ships to designate one of their pools--usually on an upper deck where they were not in full view of staterooms or public areas where there might be children present--as a topless area, or even as clothing optional, at least during certain hours. European cruise lines, especially, were far more relaxed about such things than American lines. There would be Ship's Security present in the Atlantean Grotto lounge, he knew, tactfully steering families with children or fully dressed male sightseers elsewhere.

Personally, Doherty didn't care if Harper ran around the ship stark naked. She did have a reputation to uphold in that department, after all. But right now he wanted useable footage for CNE, and the self-centered little exhibitionist just wasn't cooperating.

He'd need to text Carter back about this one.

Odd. A couple of people--they looked like teenaged boys, eighteen or nineteen, perhaps, though they could have been a couple of years older--had just emerged from the Grotto Restaurant almost directly beneath Doherty's camera position. They wore shorts, T-shirts, and sandals ... not exactly out of place at the poolside but not exactly in place, either.

"Where the hell is Security?" he asked aloud. The two kids had wandered over to the starboard rail and were leaning against it, but they weren't watching the ocean. Instead, they'd turned and were watching Harper, grinning and making suggestive motions with their hands. After a few moments, one of them pulled a cell phone from his pocket, punched in a number, and started talking into it.

"Security's probably watching the show on their TV monitors," Petrovich said.

"No," Doherty said. "They should have someone present to make sure female sunbathers don't get gawked at. Something's not right."

"Ah, they're probably just keeping a low profile. You worry too much, boss."

"Worrying is my job."

Two more teenaged boys emerged from the restaurant beneath the terrace and, a moment later, three more came out onto the terrace from the steps aft. They were laughing and joking with one another until they saw the camera crew. "Hey, man!" one said with a distinctly Midwest American accent as he leaned against the terrace rail. "You guys sure got yourselves good seats!"

"How'd you guys get past the guards?" Doherty asked.

"Guards?" the kid said, genuinely puzzled. "What guards?"

A hell of a way to run a cruise ship, Doherty thought. This was the sort of thing that could end in lawsuits-- privacy violations, indecent exposure, and even corruption of minors charges.

Or were the Europeans really that free and easy about casual social nudity?

"Wrap it up, Pet," he said. "We've got all we can use, here."

Doherty was curious. He wanted to find someone in Security and ask what the hell was going on.

He heard thunder in the distance and turned. Off to the northeast, a pair of tiny black specks winged in low above the water.

Chapter 13

Flight Harrier Alpha North Atlantic Ocean 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W Saturday, 1535 hours GMT

commander Christopher Pryor sat in the cockpit of his Sea Harrier FRS.2, watching the screen of his radar as the flight vectored toward the target as the ocean's surface blurred beneath the belly of his aircraft, less than a hundred feet below. His wingman, Commander Vincent Spick, was parked off his right wing and slightly behind, in the four o'clock position. The Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine at his back thundered raw power as the two Harriers hurtled southwest at over six hundred knots.

"Alpha One, this is Alpha Two," Spick's voice called over his helmet headset. "I have visual on the target."

Pryor glanced up. Sure enough, there it was--a cruise ship gleaming a dazzling white in the afternoon sun, still a good twenty miles off. "Copy that, Two," he replied. "I see him. Throttle back to three hundred." "One, Two. Roger three hundred." The two Harriers slowed rapidly. In the dense, wet air this close to the deck, moisture streamed from the upper curves of their wings like thick fog.

"King's Palace, this is Alpha One," he called. "Visual on target. We are on intercept approach." He flipped a switch on his console. "Cameras are rolling."

"Copy that, Alpha One," replied the voice of Flight Control back aboard the Ark Royal "Get us some good pictures."

Except for a pair of 30mm Aden Mk 4 gun pods apiece, the Harriers were unarmed. Both, however, had been fitted with reconnaissance pods, streamlined cylinders slung like bombs from their bellies containing highspeed cameras at both optical and infrared wavelengths as well as forward-looking and side-scan radar. The Sea Harrier had been designed with both fighter and reconnaissance roles in mind, and it performed both well.

Pryor brought the nose a bit higher and began angling the main engine thrust down until his Harrier seemed to be floating in mid-air, drifting forward just a bit faster than the ship was moving. He peered out the side of his canopy, studying the ship.

She was huge, a third again longer than the Ark Royal and riding considerably higher above the water. Her sides looked like cliffs closely pocked by balconies on the middecks, by portholes in long lines both higher up along the superstructure and closer to the water, and by broad expanses of glass at places like the bridge and wrapped around the aft portion of the superstructure. A large swimming pool formed a broad, rectangular patch of azure blue on her fantail; another, smaller pool was on the very top of the superstructure, between the rise of the bridge forward and the aft deckhouse and smokestack. As the Harriers slowly moved up the ship's starboard side, he could see people. Hundreds of them, appearing on the superstructure balconies, along the Promenade Deck encircling the deckhouse, and on the sundecks amidships and aft.

"King's Palace, Alpha One," he said. "I can see a lot of passengers. Some are waving. Everything looks normal."

"Copy One."

"I'm attempting to raise them now."

"Roger that. We are monitoring civilian channels."

Shifting to the radio frequency he'd been given during preflight on the Ark, Pryor began transmitting. "Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?"

There was no reply.

"Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?"

As he spoke, he eased the Harrier around past the Atlantis Queen's bow, barely a hundred yards in front of her. As he did so, the bow, followed by the long forward deck and the high, blocky deckhouse of the second ship, edged into view. The Pacific Sandpiper was securely lashed to the Queen's port side. Pryor could see the hawsers connecting the vessels clearly, along with what looked like a gangway with safety rails going from the Sandpiper's deck into an open hatch in the Atlantis Queen's side.

"Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?" He listened. "Pacific Sandpiper, Pacific Sandpiper, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?"

Damn it, why don't they respond?

Kleito's Temple, Atlantis Queen 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W Saturday, 1538 hours GMT

Dr. Stephen Penrose looked up in irritation as thunder rumbled outside. His audience, he saw, was paying more attention to the view out the large forward windows of Kleito's Temple than they were to his presentation.

"The tradition of Lyonesse as we now know it," he was saying, "goes back at least to the tenth or eleventh century, when it was supposed to have sunk beneath the waves of the English Channel. Only one man--one Trevellyn--was supposed to have escaped. Riding the fastest horse of the islands, he made it to Cornwall just ahead of the oncoming flood...."

Several of the people in his class were standing now, and a few had actually left their seats and were walking past him to the front windows.

"As, ah, as I was saying," he continued, "the tradition goes back to the Middle Ages, but there are hints of Lyonesse at much earlier times. The ancient Bretons, for instance, tell of the fable of Ker-Ys, the fabulous city of Ys, sunken somewhere between Cornwall and Brittany in Celtic times.. . ."

More people hurried forward, speaking excitedly to one another. Penrose put down his notes and scowled at them. It was bad enough that those security people had come to him just an hour before his lecture was due to begin, telling him that the Neptune Theater was closed and that he would have to give his presentation in this gaudily decorated restaurant. Now his audience was more interested in whatever was going on outside than they were in his talk.

"I beg your pardon," he said as a young couple walked past his lectern toward the front of the room. "If you don't mind, I'm trying to give a talk, here!"

He'd been flattered when the Cruise Director had approached him a month before. Penrose taught European history at London College ... but he was also known as something of an authority on Atlantis and on other traditions associated with lost or sunken continents. Sharon Reilly had proposed that he give a whole series of lectures throughout the length of the two-week cruise, with each talk timed to be given when the Atlantis Queen passed close to that particular site. They were paying him only a nominal fee, but a free booking on a Mediterranean cruise had simply been too good to pass up. He'd arranged for a grad student to take over his classes and taken a short leave of absence from the college.

This morning, as the Queen cruised out of the English Channel with Cornwall and the Stilly Isles to the north and the Breton Peninsula to the south, he was talking about Lyonesse, a mythical island that had little connection with Atlantis save for its ultimate watery fate. He found the subject fascinating, especially with its rich mythic connections with the Arthurian legends. He expected others to find it interesting as well... or at least to show some respect for those who wanted to hear.

Turning sharply, he opened his mouth to order the small crowd forward to return to their seats and stopped, eyes wide, jaw hanging. Ahead of the ship, two gray jet aircraft appeared to be hovering in mid-air in a very un-airplane like way. They were facing the ships, the air beneath their bellies blurred with the heat of their jet exhausts, seeming to drift backward to keep them just ahead of the Atlantis Queen.

"Good heavens," he said. "What do they want?"

His lecture forgotten, Penrose joined the other passengers at the forward windows.

Deck Twelve Terrace, Atlantis Queen 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W Saturday, 1538 hours GMT

"What a shot!" Fred Doherty exclaimed.

From the terrace high above the decks of the two ships he and Petrovich had an unparalleled view of the aircraft as they slowly passed up the Atlantis Queen's starboard side, then hovered for a time directly ahead, drifting backward to maintain their relative positions with the ships.

On the Grotto Pool deck below, Harper's exposure had been forgotten as both sunbathers and gawkers ran to the port side railings to watch the show. The two teenagers on the terrace leaned on the railing, pointing, jostling, yelling at each other above the howl of the two jets, and Petrovich had to move back and lean over the railing to get a good angle past them.

What the hell is going on? Doherty thought. Those jets were British, Royal Navy, he was pretty sure. He could see the blue and red roundels just behind their enormous air intakes on the sides, the red, white, and blue roundels on the wings. He'd seen Harrier jump jets before--at an air show demonstration back in the States. The Marine Corps used those aircraft, he remembered; their ability to hover like that had always amazed him.

They were hovering now thirty or forty feet above the water, their vectored jet blasts raising clouds of swirling spray from flat-blasted patches on the sea below them.

Harrier jump jets.

What the fucking hell is going on?

Flight Harrier Alpha 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W

Saturday, 1538 hours GMT

Commander Pryor tried a few more times, then gave up. "King's Palace, Alpha One," he called. "I'm getting no response from either ship."

"Copy that, Alpha One. How about the forward deck of the freighter? Could you effect a landing there?"

He'd already been wondering about that possibility. It seemed impossible that all radios on both ships should be down, and he'd begun entertaining the notion of landing his Harrier, climbing out, walking up to the Sandpiper's bridge, and demanding to know what the bloody hell was going on.

But something was nagging at him. This was more than mechanical failure, and the possibilities were making the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. Besides, that damned helicopter was in the way.

"Ah, negative, King's Palace," he said. "There's a large helicopter parked on the forward deck, off-center toward the port side. Rotor diameter appears to be about fifty feet. The forward deck is about two hundred feet long, but he's taking his chunk out of the middle. There's also a bridge crane across the deck forward. The LZ is too tight."

The Sea Harrier jump jet was a bit under forty-eight feet long, with a wingspan of just over twenty-five feet. With its superb VTOL capabilities, he could have touched down on that deck if the ship had been stationary, but the slight pitch and roll of the vessel coupled with its forward movement through the water made the risk far greater than Pryor was willing to accept. There was also the very real danger of the Harrier's exhaust overturning the helicopter if it caught the other aircraft wrong and possibly starting a fire.

"Very well, Alpha One," the voice of the flight controller said. "RTB."

Return to base. "Roger that, King's Palace. Alpha Flight, RTB. I'll see if I can get a closer look-see on my way out."