Sea of Terror (35 page)

"Stop!"

Howorth turned at the voice. The unarmed man, ignored for the opening seconds of the fight, had scooped up Mitchell's P226 and now held it aimed straight at Howorth.

"Don't move or I'll shoot!" the man shouted, his voice cracking on the last word. He held the pistol with a manic intensity, both hands on the grip, arms stiff, the gun's muzzle wobbling in his unsteady grasp. Howorth raised her hands as Mitchell dropped the AK, dangling uselessly backward in one hand.

"Don't shoot!" Howorth said; She was close to the now-armed man, close enough to see the beads of sweat rolling down his cheek. If she could get a little closer . . . "Please, don't shoot!"

"Shit!" the man said. "Shit! Shit! Shit!. .."

Howorth was startled to realize that it wasn't sweat she was seeing on the man's face but tears. He was crying. The pistol's muzzle wavered, then dropped to point at the deck as the man sagged, his shoulders heaving with his sobs.

Swiftly Howorth stepped forward and snatched the pistol from the man's hands. Mitchell retrieved the AK, then stooped to check the terrorist sprawled at the bottom of the steps. He looked up to meet Howorth's eyes. Dead, he mouthed. The tumble had broken the man's neck.

Their prisoner continued to cry.

Atlantean Grotto Lounge, Atlantis Queen 48deg 31' N, 27deg 31' W

Monday, 1702 hours GMT

Dr. Heywood Barnes stepped into the lush tropical ambir ance of the Grotto Lounge and walked forward, toward the big sliding glass doors opening onto the Deck Eleven pool area. The restaurant, curiously, was deserted. Normally, it was one of the busiest social areas on the ship. A "Closed" sign had been hanging at the front entrance, but he'd ignored it and come inside anyway. The lounge was supposed to be open all hours.

Barnes rarely got up here. His quarters, along with those of the other medical personnel on board, were on A Deck, just forward of the infirmary, and while there were no rules against his coming up into the passenger areas, fraternization was discouraged, save for very specific instances--when ship's officers dined in the formal Atlantia Restaurant on Deck One, for instance, or up on Deck Nine, in the Lost Continent.

Generally, Barnes was a solitary soul who disliked crowds and social mingling, preferences that years ago had led to his taking the position of ship's doctor when he could easily have had a thriving practice ashore.

For the past several days, however, the infirmary had been anything but quiet. Members of the ship's crew and staff kept gathering there, hanging out in the waiting area or in the staff lounge, drinking tea and coffee, and discussing them.

"Them," of course, were the foreign soldiers, presumably Arabs, who were now everywhere on board the Queen and who appeared to be in control of the ship. Two of them were in the main galley now at all times, flanking the big double doors leading to the aft A Deck hold. Galley personnel who had to go into the hold for supplies were escorted in and out and kept away from the area near the loading bay and external doors. But Johnny Berger and several other members of both staff and crew had been back there and seen a number of trucks parked near the doors and a large number of armed and uniformed men.

PA announcements and a memo from the bridge had spoken of helping the Pacific Sandpiper and of security personnel from the other ship protecting a top-secret military cargo ... but no one really believed any of it. Phone calls to the bridge had gone unanswered. Personnel who'd physically gone to the bridge or to the Security Office to talk to someone in charge had never returned. The mess stewards, though, had been ordered to take boxes of food--cold cuts and sandwiches, mostly, and hundreds of bottles of water--up to the doors leading to the Neptune Theater, where gruff and uncommunicative uniformed guards had taken them inside. Rumor had it that the missing crew members were being held prisoner inside the theater.

Earlier that afternoon, Barnes had made his way up to Deck One and found an out-of-the-way alcove in a deserted Starbucks on the mall. From there, he could see down a passageway leading forward to the theater, where he could just make out one of the guards at the entrance without being seen himself. After an hour of waiting, another guard had led a woman out of the theater and steered her to the left, toward the restrooms. After perhaps ten minutes, the two had reappeared, vanishing once more into the theater.

So ... there were prisoners being held in the theater. They were being fed and being taken to the nearest restrooms, but they were under heavy guard. Barnes had considered going up to Security but decided against it. The terrorists, if that's what they were, must be in control of the Security Department and the bridge, and if he called attention to himself, he would end up with that woman and God knew how many others tied up and under guard inside the theater.

And so, using back service access ways and emergency stairs, Barnes had ascended all the way up to Deck Eleven and the Grotto Lounge. Partly, he wanted a look at the Pacific Sandpiper, which some of the staff said was still tied up alongside as the Queen clipped ahead through the ocean at a good twenty knots--an insane pace if they were, indeed, towing another vessel. Barnes' cabin was on the starboard side of the ship, and he couldn't see anything from there. From the Deck Twelve Terrace, though, he would be able to see clearly in all directions, and be able to look down onto the Sandpiper

He also wanted to check for himself the ship's course. Rumor had it that the ship had changed direction two days ago, late Saturday, and was now heading due west, instead of south toward the Strait of Gibraltar.

He heard a clatter of noise from just ahead and froze, then stepped back into the shelter of a spray of palm fronds. The restaurant's tropical jungle decor had always seemed rather silly to him, but he was glad to have the cover now. Several men were talking to one another just ahead. There was a long string of almost guttural words, followed by a loud thump. "Iyak!" one voice cried, the voice sharp, even threatening.

Barnes had spent a year in Kuwait, during his stint as a medical officer with the British Army, right out of medical school. He didn't speak the language, but he knew Arabic when he heard it. Easing forward, he tried to get a better view.

Four uniformed men were at the glass sliding doors leading out to the pool area, and they were manhandling a large flatbed handcart piled high with wooden crates under an olive-drab tarp. The cart had just become entangled with a table as they'd tried to position it in front of the door, and the men were trying to pull the cart free. "Yallah!" the one in charge cried. "Yallah!" Two more armed men, Barnes saw, were standing outside by the pool, apparently guarding a stack of identical tarp-covered crates.

Abruptly the cart bounced free of the obstruction and three of the men wheeled the cart out onto the deck while the fourth, the leader, stood to one side, gesturing to the others. In that moment, Barnes noticed two critical things.

First of all, the afternoon sun was streaming through the broad glass windows of the Atlantean Grotto Lounge. Those windows faced forward, and if the sun was coming in that way, it meant the ship was sailing west, into the late-afternoon sun.

And as the soldiers bullied the cart out the door, the tarp had been tugged aside just enough for Barnes to see letters stenciled in black on the side of one of the cases.

"FIM-92 STIN" was all he could read, the letters centered above a portion of a serial number.

But that glimpse was enough to chill Barnes' soul.

My God! he thought. I've got to tell someone!

But who? And how?

And was it already too late?

Chapter 19

Stateroom 8001, Atlantis Queen North Atlantic Ocean 48deg 31! N, 27deg 40'W Monday, 1715 hours GMT

"it's okay," howorth told their prisoner. "It's okay! We're not going to hurt you!"

But the man continued to sob. "Zahra!" he finally managed to say. "Zahra! Nouzha!"

"What language is that?" Mitchell asked. "Arabic?" "Maybe," Howorth said. She frowned. "Actually, I think they're names."

They'd brought their prisoner down to Deck Eight, the highest deck on the liner with staterooms, and used a security passkey they'd found in the man's shirt pocket to open the door to an empty cabin. The other terrorist, the one who'd broken his neck on the stairs, had been dragged to a janitorial closet on Deck Nine and stuffed inside. They had his passcard now, too, as well as his AK-47.

Now they had the prisoner between them on the bed as they tried to get some kind of sense out of him. His emotional breakdown had been startlingly swift and complete; Howorth doubted that he was one of the terrorists. He'd not been armed, and he was wearing a Royal Sky uniform. Possibly he was as much a hostage as the rest of the Queen's passengers and crew.

"My . . . wife . . .," the man finally managed to say, shoulders heaving. "My wife, Zahra. And... my daughter. . .

"What about them?" Mitchell asked. Standing suddenly, reaching down, he grabbed the front of the prisoner's blue security force uniform and bunched up his other fist. "You'd best start talking, raghead, or--"

"Stop it!" Howorth said, pushing the fist aside. "Damn it, Mitchell, this isn't an interrogation!"

"Like hell it isn't!" But he relaxed slightly, backing off.

"Tell us about Zahra," Howorth asked the prisoner.

"My ... wife. They have her. And my daughter . . ."

"Who? Who has her?"

"Yusef Khalid. The leader of Islamist Jihad International. The men who ... who have taken over this ship."

"Are you a part of this group, then?" Mitchell demanded.

The prisoner shook his head. "No. Or ...

Slowly, they managed to drag the whole story from their prisoner He was Mohamed Ghailiani, and he was a Moroccan emigrant, now a British subject and an employee of Royal Sky Line, living in Woolston, just across the river from Southampton. Khalid's people had abducted Ghailiani's wife and daughter, were holding them to ensure Ghailiani's cooperation.

"Do you know where they're keeping them?" Howorth asked.

Ghailiani shook his head. "No. But they've been e-mailing me ... pictures. To show me they're still alive. And to... to remind me." He closed his eyes, his face screwing tight with rising panic. "Oh, God! I'll never see them again!"

"You will, Mohamed," Howorth told him. "We can help you! But you'll have to help us."

"When they know I've helped you," he said, pain etching his voice raw, "when they know I've talked to you, they'll--" He broke off, sobbing again.

"This is useless," Mitchell said.

"No," Howorth told him. "This may be the one big break we need. You know they're going to be putting together some kind of rescue op. Mohamed, here, will be able to give us all the intel we need. We just have to show him we can help his family."

"They . .. they're going to kill them," Ghailiani said, miserable. "They're going to kill them"

"Not if we have anything to say about it," Howorth told him. "We need to get to my stateroom and get my computer. And we'll need your e-mail account information, Mohamed. Address and password. Can you do that for us?"

Slowly, Ghailiani nodded.

"I think we'd better get out of here anyway," Mitchell said. "They'll be tracking this guy and his buddy. And us."

"Too right." Together, they helped Ghailiani stand and move toward the door.

Infirmary, Atlantis Queen 48deg 31' N, 27deg 44'W Monday, 1720 hours GMT

Dr. Barnes sat down at the console in the back of the infirmary and switched on the power. Slipping the headphones on over his ears, he dialed up the volume slightly, listening to the hiss and crackle of ionospheric static.

The shortwave radio had been installed in the cruise ship's infirmary as a lifesaving measure, a means for the medical personnel to communicate directly with a hospital ashore in medical emergencies without having to run all the way up to Deck Twelve and the radio shack aft of the bridge.

He'd first tried using his cell phone, of course. The Atlantis Queen's onboard cell network connected via satellite to shore networks, enabling passengers to make calls and connect with the Internet. However, when he tried to make a connection, all he got was a recorded voice telling him the system was temporarily unavailable. That, he reasoned, would have been one of the first things hijackers would do--shut down the phone network so that the hostages on the ship couldn't call out.

But, just possibly, the hijackers didn't know about the infirmary shortwave.

"This is Delta Charlie Sierra One-one-three Echo," he said. "To any station hearing this call. Mayday, mayday, mayday.. ."

The danger, of course, was that they might monitor the call from the radio shack. But it would take them time to get down here, or to disable the antenna on the radio mast.

"To any station hearing this call, mayday, mayday, mayday..."

Security Office, Atlantis Queen 48deg 31' N, 27deg 44'W Monday, 1722 hours GMT

"Where are they going?" Khalid demanded.

"It's hard to tell," Haqqani replied, studying the liner's deck schematic. "They were on Deck Eight, but they're going down, now." He pointed. "This stairwell." "Who do we have near there?" "No one, sir. It's . .. it's a big ship." Khalid scowled. That had been the problem from the beginning. With only thirty-one men on the Atlantis Queen, plus the fifteen or so he might be able to borrow from the Pacific Sandpiper at any given time, his personnel assets were sharply limited. There were so many places on board where he had to have people at all times--the bridge, engineering, watching the prisoners in the theater, the aft hold on A Deck, the fantail, the Deck Eleven Terrace. Most of the men had been awake for thirty hours straight at this point, and he needed to let them start rotating shifts to get some sleep.

But the two he'd sent aft to deal with the intruders on Deck Eleven had run into trouble. They should have returned almost immediately with two prisoners or word that the intruders had been dealt with ... but according to the monitor, they were moving down and aft through the ship. Deck Six, apparently.