Sea of Terror (43 page)

With the repulse of the helicopter strike, Khalid was sure that they would have at least a day or two before another attempt was made. According to the colored symbols on the electronic chart table, the enemy ships were keeping well back, none closer than about 250 kilometers.

His big concern now was controlling the ship's thirty-three hundred passengers and crew.

Ghailiani trembled under Khalid's hand.

"Have you seen your e-mail yet today?" Khalid asked, dropping his hand.

The man, his eyes screwed tightly shut, managed a jerky nod.

"Then you know your wife and daughter remain safe. Our original bargain still stands. You help us to the full extent to which you are capable. And your wife and daughter will not be harmed."

"I will do anything you command, Amir. Anything."

"I know you will. And soon this mission will be over, and you will rejoin your family as a very wealthy man. For now, though, I need your help in security. I know this ship has sensors to monitor when people have wandered into areas where they should not go, yes?"

Ghailiani nodded again.

"Good. And I would like you to . . . extend the list of such places, so that we can know immediately when one of the free passengers wanders into a stairwell, say, or the deck outside."

"I can do that, Amir."

"Good. Do it, then."

A sudden blast of wind struck the bridge windows as Ghailiani departed, followed by a rattle of rain. The weather was turning ugly, the sky turbulent and overcast.

Good. That meant even less likelihood of an enemy attack.

High up next to the ceiling of the ship's bridge, a TV monitor was displaying CNN, via a satellite feed. A woman was talking earnestly into the camera, telling of a rumored deal being struck between the U. S. government and the Atlantis Queen hijackers.

Khalid smiled.

The Americans had fallen all over themselves in transmitting a radio message accepting the IJI Brigade's terms. The promise of $2 billion and the release of several hundred Islamic prisoners ... that in itself was a sweet victory, almost victory enough to leave Yusef Khalid believing in a beneficent and all-powerful Allah.

Almost. This victory had been won with daring, imagination, sacrifice, and a great deal of money from al-Qaeda's financial backers in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and elsewhere. It wasn't necessary to drag God into the equation.

Still, knowing that the Americans had capitulated filled Khalid with a surging sense of power, of purpose. A handful of fighters willing to sacrifice themselves in the name of Allah had brought the world's so-called sole superpower to its knees.

It was a shame, really, that he wouldn't be accepting the American offer. He'd given orders to maintain radio silence, to refuse to respond to any signal from the Americans or the British.

Later, when they were closer to New York City, he would begin to negotiate, but only to drag things out and give them the opportunity to take these vessels and their radioactive cargos all the way into the port and cram them up America's ass.

Khalid wasn't interested in money or in freed prisoners.

He was interested solely in revenge.

Hangar Deck, USS Eisenhower 43deg 54' N, 54deg 18' W Wednesday, 1625 hours GMT

"Another delay?" Charlie Dean asked.

"I'm afraid so," Rubens' voice replied in his head, speaking over his communications implants. "But this time it's the weather."

Around him stretched the gray recesses of the Eisenhower's hangar deck, a high-ceilinged cavern filled with the crouching forms of aircraft, wings folded, quiescent. The two Black Cat assault teams crouched nearby in front of Lieutenant Richard Taylor, who was drawing with a black marker on a large whiteboard with side-by-side deck schematics of the two ships printed on it.

"Conditions are still decent here," Dean said. He'd just come down from the ship's Met Office.

"But your target is sailing through a squall line right now. They're telling us to expect high winds and unfavorable sea states along the Queen's course for the next twelve hours at least."

And by the time the bad weather had passed, dawn would be approaching. The insertion had to take place at night to have any chance at all of success.

"So we're looking going in at sometime tomorrow night," Dean said.

"Use the time to study those deck plans and photos," Rubens told him. "And we'll be developing our contact with Carrousel."

"Tell her to keep her head down," Dean said.

"Rubens out."

Bridge, Atlantis Queen 44deg 49' N, 54deg 10' W

Wednesday, 2114 hours GMT + 4

"What the hell is that noise?" Khalid demanded.

Phillips, the ship's captain, stood before him between two armed men. "What noise would that be?"

"You can't have not heard it."

Khalid had ordered Phillips brought to the bridge. Much of the time, he and the other bridge officers were kept confined in a watch room down the passageway behind the bridge. One or another of them could be brought to the bridge any time there was a need for their advice. Khalid didn't like the look in Phillips' eyes, however, and since he and a few trusted Brigade soldiers could handle the ship's wheel, watch the compass, and keep an eye on the electronic chart table and radar, there was no need for the regular ship's officers on the bridge at all.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Phillips replied.

As if on cue, then, a long, low, grinding rumble sounded, transmitted through the steel deck of the bridge. The ship itself gave a lurching shudder.

"That noise," Khalid growled. "Will you tell me what it is, or shall I put several of your passengers overboard?"

The threat seemed to batter down Phillips' defenses. "The sea is getting rougher," he said. "The two ships, this one and the Sandpiper, are of different lengths, and different drafts, so they ride the waves differently from one another."

Khalid walked to the port bridge wing and looked aft. It was dark and raining, but in the haze of glowing mist illuminated by the Pacific Sandpiper's deck lights, he could see the smaller ship grinding unevenly against the Adantis Queen's side.

"Are we in danger?"

"I don't know. It's hard to tell. If the sea gets any rougher, the Sandpiper could stove us in, I suppose."

"What can we do about it?"

Phillips gave a halfhearted shrug. "You could bring both ships about into the wind," he said. "Cut our speed until we're just barely making way, and ride out the storm."

"We do not need the delay," Khalid said. "We have a schedule to keep." He gestured toward the officer. "Take him back to his quarters."

As Phillips was led away, Khalid called the radio watch. "Sadeeq! Raise the Pacific Sandpiper"

"Yes, sir."

"Tell them we are going to separate the ships. Our time together is over."

The two would proceed to their respective targets separately from here on out.

Chapter 23

Stateroom 4005, Atlantis Queen North Atlantic Ocean 42deg 58' N, 61deg 54' W Thursday, 1320 hours EST

"who do you work for?" jerry Esterhausen asked. "SAS? The American Delta Force? I know! The CIA!"

"Believe it or not, I'm a relatively low-level clerk," Carolyn Howorth told him. If he wanted to jump to the conclusion that she was CIA, that was fine with her. "I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Or the right place, right time," he said with feeling. They were seated at the desk in Esterhausen's stateroom. Late last night, he'd brought her down here, and she'd slept here. Only slept; Esterhausen had gallantly let her have the queen-sized bed while he took the double-wide love-seat sofa. It was, Howorth was forced to admit, infinitely better than blankets and life jackets in a lifeboat outside.

She'd been up early, however, sending more reports back to GCHQ and NSA Headquarters and also trying to raise Mohamed Ghailiani.

He was alive. She was fairly certain of that, now. According to GCHQ, which was closely monitoring every transmission in and out of the Atlantis Queen, another JPEG photo of Ghailiani's wife and daughter had been transmitted to his e-mail account on Tuesday, again on Wednesday, and then yet again that morning. The images weren't piling up in his in-box, either, but were being opened each morning. With Ghailiani's e-mail account password, she could check that. If he had been killed, there would have been no reason to keep Nouzha and Zahra Ghailiani alive, no need to keep e-mailing photographs of them with a fresh copy of the Guardian each morning. Both women would have been dead within hours of Mohamed Ghailiani's death.

The question was whether or not she could develop the guy as an agent-in-place. He'd been co-opted by the terrorists through threats to his family; perhaps he could be turned if those threats could be eliminated. However, he'd been so terrified the other day, so broken, that she wasn't sure he would be of any use even if she could elicit his cooperation.

Early that morning, she'd finished typing out an exploratory e-mail, addressed it to Ghailiani's account, and clicked send. The slow packet transmission rate meant that it would take a while to get there, and she had no
i.e.
when he would again be checking his shipboard account.

But right now she had nothing but time. Her fingers clattered over the keyboard and, suddenly, a mail icon popped up. She clicked on it.

Who are you?

She stared at the three words for a long moment. The e should be from Ghailiani himself, but there was always the possibility that someone else, one of the terrorists, was reading his e-mail for him. It was possible that they didn't trust him to access his e-mail without someone reading over his shoulder. So Who are you? might be from Ghailiani, or it might be from a tango.

A friend, she typed back. You know me. I can help you. She pressed send.

It would take a while for Jerry's computer to send the message at its deliberate electronic snail's pace. She waited.

Waterhouse Lane, Millbrook Southampton, England Thursday, 1910 hours GMT

They'd been watching them all day.

MI5 had found the flat two days before, on Tuesday afternoon. A policeman had called in the black sedan with its license registration of Y9WE83K, parked on Waterhouse Lane in front of a line of two-story brown-stone row houses in an aging section of town. The neighborhood was just three miles across town from the Ghailiani residence, an easy drive out the A3057.

MI5 agents had questioned neighbors, learning from them that two men, foreign-looking and secretive, had moved into the vacant flat only two weeks earlier. The two apparently kept to themselves--and that of itself was enough to attract attention and elicit comment in a clannish and close-knit community such as Millbrook.

MI5 had talked to the people living next door, a newly married Indian couple named Rajeesh. The two had been temporarily evicted on Tuesday, moved to a hotel in Southampton for the duration, and with the promise that the government would take care of any damages. MI5 had moved in, entering the flat from the rear two at a time in order to try to avoid alerting the residents at Number 1240 next door. Lia DeFrancesca and Ilya Akulinin had arrived on Wednesday, setting up a satellite radio link with both MI5 and GCHQ.

Early on Thursday morning, while it was still dark in the hours before dawn, the SAS had arrived as well. The takedown, code-named Imperial, was a go.

The upstairs of the Rajeesh apartment had been transformed into a military command post, the furniture moved downstairs, the carpets rolled up, and folding chairs and tables brought in for the banks of computers and monitors being used by the HRT personnel. Two technicians had used silenced electrical saws to cut through the south wall, which, according to architectural plans from the local planning-board office, should back up against the north wall of the suspect's bedroom. Working with extreme and methodical care in absolute silence, they brought down a seven-foot-high, nine-foot-wide section of lath and plaster wall, exposing the back side of the suspect's wall and the nine-inch gap between the two.

A hand drill was used to very, very slowly bore into this final barrier, a sheet of aging lath and plaster half an inch thick. The resultant hole was scarcely wider than a finishing nail, but it accepted the stiff end of a horoscope probe, connected by a fiber-optic cable to a TV monitor on a folding table several feet away.

The horoscope's fish-eye lens revealed nearly all of the room next door, and it provided the final proof that MI5 had found the right place. Two women could be seen tied on the bed. Two and sometimes three men came and went. Sensitive microphones placed against the wall's interior side let the HRT team hear everything that happened, every word that was spoken. A couple of Arabic-speaking translators were brought in, who sat and listened to everything as the recorders rolled.

But Imperial couldn't go in immediately. Clearance needed to be won from higher levels of the bureaucracy, and unless the two victims were in immediate danger, an entry warrant needed to be approved by the local magistrate. The watchers at first couldn't see either of the women's faces, and there was at least a small chance that MI5 was peeking in on a kinky sex scene rather than an actual kidnapping.

So they watched, and they recorded. Both women were positively identified when their captors temporarily released them to let them use the toilet or to allow them to eat. The warrant didn't come through until late Thursday, however. The government was still stinging from allegations of abridged citizens' rights and illegal surveillance issues, and magistrates were being a lot more cautious now to safeguard citizens' rights to privacy.

And so MI5, the SAS HRT, and the two American liaisons had watched and listened as, early Thursday morning, one of the men photographed the women in the bed with a folded newspaper, then downloaded the image onto a laptop computer and sent it off. They watched in helpless and steadily building fury as the captors talked among themselves or described to the two helpless women in gruesome detail just what they were going to do with them when they were no longer needed.