Sea of Terror (25 page)

He gentled the throttle forward, letting the Sea Harrier drift ahead. His intent was to essentially hover just off the Sandpiper's port side and let the ship pass him only a few yards away. That would give him, and the electronics packed into his reconnaissance pod, an excellent close-up look at the plutonium ship and a chance to see if anything seemed wrong or out of place on board. Spick followed, keeping his aircraft farther out to give Pryor elbow room for the close-in maneuver.

As the ship passed in front of him, Pryor could see people on the bridge, shadowy figures watching him, though he could make out no details. That meant the ship was manned, however; he'd begun wondering if everyone had packed up and moved on board the Atlantis Queen next door. He could also see a large number of the Queen's passengers watching the show from their seaside balconies and open deck spaces above the Sandpiper. It was eerie having all of those people watch him--just like at an air show--but with no radio contact at all.

His attention, however, was suddenly drawn to some damaged areas on the Sandpiper's forward deck, between the helicopter and the crane--stanchions torn up or knocked over along the starboard side and fist-sized dents and rips in the steel deck.

Gun Mount One, Pacific Sandpiper 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W Saturday, 1538 hours GMT

Abdullah Wahidi was shaking, sweat soaking his face beneath his kaffiyeh. The British warplane was less than a hundred feet away, now, and slowly drifting closer. The second aircraft was farther off, too far to see details, but the near one . ..

He could see the pilot's head, encased in an oxygen mask, helmet, and dark goggles, behind the clear canopy. He had the unnerving feeling that the pilot was staring directly at him.

Abdullah Wahidi had been born in the teeming camps of the Gaza, raised from infancy with an implacable hatred of the Zionists, the Jews, and taught from childhood that it was his sacred duty to die a martyr's death for Allah, the Almighty. For a time, Wahidi had rallied to the Taliban's call, fighting with the international jihadists against the Americans in Afghanistan. He'd trained at a camp in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan, where he'd learned how to operate antiaircraft weapons such as the Russian ZSU-23 and the American shoulder-fired Stinger missile.

He'd never fired anything like this, however, and he grasped the handle gingerly, as though he feared it would bite him. He wanted to run.

The raw emotion, the terror, shamed him. He'd volunteered for this operation, knowing beyond the shadow of any doubt that he would die. He wanted to die. Had he not been given this opportunity to serve Allah, the mighty, the magnificent, he would have died behind the wheel of a truck laden with explosives, detonating the cargo at some embassy, military checkpoint, or other target in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel. Death, a glorious death that meant Paradise for him and money for his family, was what he sought more than anything else in this world.

Why, then, was he so anxious to flee?

The enemy aircraft was drifting closer. It wasn't natural for something that looked like a jet to float like a helicopter, but that was exactly what the machine was doing. His grip tightened slightly, and he moved the barrel of the 30mm cannon, tracking the target.

"Abdullah! Abdullah!" his loader cried. "He's coming closer! He sees us!"

"We are to hold our fire!"

The enemy aircraft began pivoting slowly, until its nose pointed directly at the gun mount, at the same time beginning to rise as the whine from its engine increased to a shrill blast of noise.

"But he sees us! He's going to shoot! In Allah's name, firel Fire!"

Flight Harrier Alpha 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W Saturday, 1538 hours GMT

With a dawning sense of horror, Pryor realized what it was that he was seeing. His head snapped around as he looked at the Sandpiper's superstructure. A panel was hanging open just beneath the bridge level, exposing one of the ship's 30mm gun mounts at the corner of the deckhouse. The gun, sixty feet away, now, was aimed directly at him.

He knew from his preflight briefing that the Pacific Sandpiper was armed, but the information was strictly of academic interest, since he and Spick weren't expecting to engage the ship in combat. As Pryor stared into the black cavern of the compartment housing the cannon, however, he began to make out shapes half-masked by the shadows--two men behind the gun, looking back at him with wide and terrified eyes.

"Tango, tango, tango!" he shouted over the open radio channel. At the same time, he applied full right rudder and full vectored thrust, pivoting the Sea Harrier to the right and lifting it straight up. He needed to get clear of the ship before shifting to forward flight. He could feel the aircraft shuddering violently, and the view forward through his canopy was obscured by blossoming puffs of gray smoke.

The shudders grew worse, and he heard the shrill clang of metal on metal, heard the port side compressor fan shredding in a storm of metallic shards.

"Mayday! Mayday!" he called, frantically battling with the controls as his aircraft began rolling to the right and out of control. "Alpha Flight is under fire! Repeat, we are--"

And his canopy exploded in his face as the Sea Harrier began disintegrating.

Deck Twelve Terrace, Atlantis Queen 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W Saturday, 1539 hours GMT

Fred Doherty heard the clatter of a heavy automatic weapon firing before he saw what was happening, and his first thought was that the two ships were grinding together, that hull metal was tearing, and he reflexively grasped the terrace's safety rail. From high up on the Queen's Deck Twelve Terrace, though, he and Petrovich had an excellent view out over the Sandpiper's bridge house, and they could see both Harriers hovering above the water off the smaller vessel's port side immediately beyond the freighter's bridge. The rattling thump continued as the front half of the nearer aircraft appeared to disintegrate as if in a hurricane blast; bits of metal were peeling up and off and flying away behind as the nose was engulfed in a staccato burst of small explosions.

"Tell me you're getting this, Pet!" Doherty said softly. Petrovich had been filming the approach of the two Royal Navy aircraft; his camera was locked onto the Sea Harrier as it yawed sharply right and then vanished behind the Sandpiper's bridge. "Tell me you got that!"

Aviation fuel exploded, the fireball boiling up from behind the Sandpiper's superstructure. The second Sea Harrier, farther away than the first, dropped its right wing and began accelerating rapidly, its engines howling as it streaked past the Sandpiper scant yards above the water. The thud-thud-thud of autocannon fire continued to hammer from the freighter's guns. As the Harrier hurtled toward the east, its slipstream raising a rooster tail of spray from the surface, green tracer rounds flicked toward it, throwing up gouts of spray. Petrovich had panned his camera from the fireball left past the Sandpiper's superstructure, following the fleeing aircraft as it vanished toward the horizon.

Silently Doherty put one hand on Petrovich's shoulder and pointed. As the Queen and the Sandpiper continued plowing forward, the wreckage of the downed aircraft slid into view astern of the freighter, its tail sticking up out of the water at a sharp angle, aviation gasoline spreading around it and burning furiously. Petrovich kept filming as Doherty scanned the water, looking for some sign, any sign, that the pilot had ejected or managed to get clear. He wondered if he should throw a life ring ... or get help ...

Then he began to realize through the mind-clouding shock that the Sandpiper had attacked those aircraft, had deliberately opened fire on them and shot one of them down.

"My God!" was all he was able to say, his voice tightening as he choked out the words.

"We'll... we'll need to get this out right away by satellite," Petrovich said.

"I don't think so," Doherty managed to reply. His thoughts were racing furiously. Ever since the rendezvous with the Pacific Sandpiper, things had been wrong. The two ships lashed together and heading southwest, without explanation from captain or crew; the fact that they'd left the area where the other ship had sunk so quickly; the odd lack of security on the sundeck just now; and now this. "Jim, I think we've been hijacked!"

"You're shitting me!"

"Damn it, that other ship shot that plane down!"

He could see the realization working its way through the cameraman's thoughts. "Holy Christ!"

The film crew had an arrangement with Royal Sky Line to transmit footage and interviews back to CNE using the Queen's onboard satellite communications system and didn't have a satellite transmitter of their own.

"Look," he said. "If we have been hijacked, they'll be in control of the radio room. And they might not like it that we got those pictures. We need to hide the tape."

"Yeah. Yeah. Hide the tape. . . ."

Something was happening on the Grotto Pool deck. Two men wearing blue and white security uniforms had just burst out of the Grotto Restaurant. They were carrying AK-47 assault rifles, and they were shouting at the passengers gathered at the railing, "You! You! All of you! Move back! Move back!"

The passengers were screaming. "Jesus!" Fred Doherty said. It was a hijacking, a hijacking in progress. "Get that!"

Doherty pointed the camera again as the gunmen herded the screaming crowd back from the railing and past the pool. At least four of the women, including Harper, were still topless, were trying to cover themselves with their arms. One of the gunmen picked up a bright red beach towel from one of the chairs and flung it at one of them. "Filthy Western sluts!" Doherty heard him scream. "Cover yourselves decently!" As the women snatched up towels or bikini tops, the gunmen waited, then started herding all of the passengers toward the restaurant.

One gunman glanced up and saw Doherty, the two teenagers, and Petrovich with his camera on the terrace above. The gunman aimed his rifle. "You, up there! Do not move!"

Doherty slowly raised his hands and took a step back from the railing. "I think we'd better do what he says."

A moment later, he heard the sound of running footsteps at his back.

Promenade Deck, Atlantis Queen 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W Saturday, 1539 hours GMT

Carolyn Howorth was on the Promenade Deck, on the port side forward, just in front of the Queen's towering white superstructure. She'd come out here for a better look as soon as she'd heard the thunder of the two approaching jets and seen them move past her stateroom porthole on the starboard side. She'd jogged down three decks, cut across the atrium and the onboard shopping mall, and emerged on the Promenade just as the two Sea Harriers began drifting past on the far side of the Pacific Sandpiper.

Hundreds of other passengers were already on the Promenade, and she had to shoulder forward a bit to get a good view. Deck Three, the Promenade Deck, was above the Sandpiper's deck alongside, but about at the same level as the freighter's bridge. She reached the railing just as one of the Harriers came apart in a hail of 30mm cannon fire.

Passengers around her began screaming, some streaming back for the imagined shelter of the Queen's interior, others just pushing away from the port side railing, as if they were afraid the Sandpiper was about to turn those unexpected guns on them next. Turning, she looked up at the Queen's bridge high overhead, but she was too close to see in through those high, slanted windows.

She wasn't certain what was happening, but she knew she had to get back to her stateroom. She needed to use her laptop to get in touch with either GCHQ or their American cousins, the NSA, and she needed to do it now.

Once back inside the Queen's superstructure, however, Howorth found the passageways too jammed with humanity for her to make any progress. By the time she reached the Atrium and the Grand Staircase, she wasn't able to move at all. Instead, she ducked back into the ship's Starbucks and began considering her options.

Her laptop was in her stateroom, on Deck six, three levels up. There was a service stairway behind her, she remembered, that would take her up to six and, better still, on to Deck eleven, and Security. If it was less packed than the Grand Staircase in the Atrium, maybe she could find David Llewellyn.

That staircase would also take her down two decks, to the First Deck, where, she remembered, a computer center offered Internet access to passengers.

Two decks down was better than either three or eight decks up.

Emerging once more into the current of panicked passengers, she headed for the computer center.

Chapter 14

Deck One, Atlantis Queen North Atlantic Ocean 48deg 25' N, 9deg 28' W Saturday, 1539 hours GMT

thomas Mitchell and samuel Franks were in the ship's computer center when Mitchell heard the far-off drumroll of thunder. On this sunny Saturday afternoon, the two of them were the only people in the computer center.

The center, located off the large, broad atrium on the First Deck through which they'd first entered the ship, provided shipboard passengers with a large number of computers and access, by way of the Queen's own server system, to a satellite link and the Internet.

Franks was using that access now to check SOCA, Interpol, and Europol databases for names he'd gotten from the Purser's Office that morning, a list of the roughly nine hundred crew and staff people who worked on board this floating hotel. Mitchell was using another computer to complete and transmit a report for MI5 on what the two agents had accomplished so far on this cruise, which was, essentially, nothing. When he was done with that chore, he planned to help Franks divvy up the names and start searching, looking for anyone with previous convictions for selling drugs, smuggling, association with criminal elements, hell, for failure to use the zebra crossing zones at Piccadilly Circus if he had to. There had to be something.

Mitchell dismissed the sound at first as thunder, but after a few moments he realized that he could still hear it. "Hey, Franks? You hear that?"

"Huh? Whadjasay?"

"That rumble. You hear it?"