Sea of Terror (44 page)

Captain Burns, in charge of the HRT, was ready to go in without a warrant on the assumption that the women were in imminent danger. He was convinced to wait by Ronald Harriman, the senior MI5 officer on the scene. If the HRT went through that wall and things went badly, if the tangos on the other side of that wall were able to get word to the terrorists at sea, Mohamed Ghailiani might become a liability and die . . . and that might mean repercussions that would result in SAS casualties on the Atlantis Queen as well. In the wake of the abortive helicopter attack on Tuesday, everyone was being super-cautious and playing it strictly by the book.

And so they waited.

The warrant and final approval for the assault came through by mid-afternoon on Thursday. Burns and Harriman both agreed that they would wait a few hours more. The tangos seemed to have established a routine; each evening, one of their number would leave the flat and buy takeout food. On Wednesday night, they had watched the terrorists gather in a group, all three of them standing together around a table on the far side of the bedroom from the captives. If they followed the same pattern on Thursday, that was when the hostage rescue team would go in.

At around six-thirty, one of the tangos left to get dinner. By this time, the SAS troopers had placed a large loop of yellow det cord against the interior of the lath and plaster wall, with extra lumps of C-4 placed as cutting charges against the exposed studs. Detonators were placed at several points along the det cord and in every C-4 charge, with all of them carefully woven together by wires to the firing box in the middle of the room. The HRT unit prepared for the assault, each man wearing black battle dress, combat harness, balaclava, and gas mask and carrying H&K MP5 submachine guns.

Lia DeFrancesca sat with the MI5 technical people, watching the screen. Harriman signaled that spotters outside were watching the man who'd left to get food and was returning, and four SAS troopers took their place at the jump-off, facing the old plaster wall and detcord-woven studs. Two more stood to either side of the detcord loop, well back from the blast zone but ready to move in support of the four-man unit. A military doctor and a pair of medical specialists waited in the rear, as seconds dragged by and the Imperial HRT waited for the final signal.

A moment later, clearly visible on the monitor, the man who'd gone for food entered the bedroom with a brown paper bag, which he took to the table. The other two tangos had been sitting beside the bed teasing their prisoners. Both of the men stood and walked to the table, still laughing. They had pistols tucked into their belts; three AK-47s had previously been spotted leaning against a wall beside the window overlooking the street, as though the tangos were ready for a police siege.

As they began removing cartons of Lebanese takeout from the bag, DeFrancesca gave Burns a thumbs-up and Burns pointed at the trooper manning the firing box. The man pressed a button, and the det cord exploded, a dazzling, lopsided circle of fierce white light accompanied by a startlingly loud blast as the wall disintegrated in plaster dust, smoke, and splinters.

On the monitor, all three men were swatted back from the blast; the four troopers on point rushed through the sudden opening while plaster and chunks of wood were still falling, their H&Ks tucked up against their shoulders, already firing as they moved.

Two of the terrorists, the two with pistols, were hit and killed instantly. The third, sprawled on the debris-covered floor, groped blindly for one of the AKs. One of the troopers brought his boot down on the man's arm and shoved the muzzle of his weapon against the man's skull. The other troopers moved to different corners of the room, then positioned themselves to cover the door leading to the hallway and stairs outside.

"Clear!" one of the HRT troopers yelled.

The entire assault had taken less than three seconds.

Stateroom 4005, Atlantis Queen 43deg 20' N, 60deg 53' W Thursday, 1535 hours EST

Howorth read the last message from Ghailiani: how cani truist you?

The answer, of course, was that he couldn't. . . any more than she could trust him, no matter how badly spelled his e-mail reply was. She wondered if he'd composed that last while actually talking with one of the terrorists, pretending to work, perhaps, while typing quickly and blindly before hitting the send key.

But she'd moments before received confirmation from GCHQ that the Imperial assault had gone down without a hitch, and that the proof Ghailiani needed before committing himself was already being transmitted.

Take a look at the next mail from home, she typed. Open it as an HTML document and click on the link. She hit send.

Security Office, Atlantis Queen 42deg 42' N, 62deg 36' W

Thursday, 1625 hours EST

Ghailiani sat at his workstation, staring at his in-box folder for his e-mail. Haqqani was with him, seated at another console. He couldn't see Ghailiani's screen.

This latest e-mail was from an unknown sender, someone ashore. The woman, Janet Carroll, had told him it would be coming, however, hinting that it would have the proof he needed.

He held his breath as he clicked on the mail icon.

A photograph opened in front of him, a somewhat grainy image of the sort taken by a cell-phone camera, but still in full color and with a level of detail that left his arms and knees weak, left him trembling, had his heart pounding in his chest.

It was yet another digital photograph of Nouzha and his beloved Zahra, but this time, instead of being another in a sickening series of photos depicting a slow, ongoing nightmare of a striptease, Zahra and Nouzha were free, free

The bedroom in which they'd been held was utterly trashed, with pieces of wood scattered everywhere and a layer of plaster dust over everything and everyone, including both of the two women. His wife and daughter were standing up, blankets over their shoulders and wrapped close around them as British military personnel helped them walk. Several of their rescuers were visible in the photo, anonymous in black military jumpsuits and bulletproof vests, knit balaclavas, and full-face gas masks.

Both women were crying, the tears streaking the film of plaster dust on their faces like makeup. Underneath the photo, someone had typed: They're okay. On way to hospital for checkup. Both safe. Following that line were two blue-highlighted words: Click here.

They were safe!. . .

"What's wrong?" Haqqani asked, his voice sharp.

Ghailiani realized that tears were running down his own face, that his hands were shaking. Somehow, he managed to reach out and hit the key that closed the image. "I... I'm thinking about my family," he said. "How I might not see them again. ..."

"Do what we tell you and they'll be safe," Haqqani said with a shrug. "Allah will keep them safe."

He already has, Ghailiani thought. Allah, and someone named Janet Carroll.

Pyramid Club Casino, Atlantis Queen 41deg 17' N, 67deg 08'W Thursday, 2215 hours EST

"So ... am I ever going to get my computer back?" Jerry Esterhausen asked.

They'd come back up to Deck Nine and the casino earlier that evening, ordering dinner and sitting with the handful of passengers who seemed to have made the Pyramid Club their preferred gathering spot. So far, their terrorist captors had made no move to sequester them or to limit their freedom to move around, save to ban them from a handful of key shipboard areas. The armed intruders went about their work or stood guard in certain spots scattered about the ship and for the most part didn't interfere with the passengers when they went out to get meals or to sit in small groups in places like the casino and talk.

Questions about the safety of people who'd disappeared were ignored or, at best, shunted aside with a curt statement that they were safe so long as the rest of the crew and passengers made no trouble.

And none of the hijackers would reply to questions about how much longer this drama would play out or what was going to happen to the passengers of the ship when they arrived at their unknown destination.

"Just one more moment," she said. Howorth looked around the casino, checking to see if anyone was watching. One tango was standing inside the glass doors leading out to the pool deck, and two more were visible just outside in the spill of light from within the room. No one was paying attention to her or Esterhausen, seated in a booth in an out-of-the-way corner. She opened the latest e-mail from Ghailiani and read it.

Saw picture. Thank you. From bottom of heart thank you. Clicked HTML page. Nothing. Now what? And this one was signed: Ghailiani.

Just wait, she typed back, and then clicked send. The clock on Esterhausen's laptop, which was still set to GMT, read: "10:18 PM." If the mission GCHQ had mentioned in its last e-mail to her was on schedule, they should be seeing some action here within just a few more hours.

There was a sudden commotion at the forward door to the casino. Several passengers--a handful of elderly women and men--had been on the point of leaving, but they were being ordered back into the casino by one of the hijackers. "No! No!" the man shouted. "You stay here, now!"

"What's the meaning of this?" another man demanded.

The hijacker pushed him back with a jab from his rifle. "All of you, stay here now! No move anywhere!"

"What the hell?" Esterhausen asked.

"I think they're getting nervous about us moving around," Howorth told him. "Maybe they're watching our aircraft out there, following us."

"What does it mean?"

"That things are going to start happening damned fast, now."

Howorth set up one final e-mail, this one addressed to GCHQ and the NSA: Ghailiani clicked HTML page. Carrousel in casino, Deck 9, 2218 EST Two tangos outside by Atlas Pool, one inside casino. Ready to receive visitors.

Again she hit send. The message was encrypted using a GCHQ cipher originally created at Fort Meade, so in the unlikely event that someone in Ship's Security was aware of her mail, they weren't reading it.

"Okay, Jerry," Carolyn said, closing the e-mail account and sliding the computer across the table to Esterhausen. "It's all yours."

"What did you do?"

She shrugged. "Nothing much. Called down the wrath of God on the unbelievers, maybe. Just a little."

"I don't understand."

"You will," Carolyn Howorth said. "Just be patient, and you will."

Osprey Cambridge One 40deg 19' N, 69deg 06' W Friday, 0442 hours EST

The V-22 Osprey droned through the night, its enormous twin props in the forward flight configuration, driving the aircraft along at just over 270 knots. On the red-lit cargo deck, twenty-four men in combat dress that gave them the look of malevolent beings from another world quietly waited, their rucksacks parked between their booted feet.

"We're approaching the drop zone, Mr. Dean," the cargo master said over the intercom. "Ten more minutes to drop." "Right."

Dean looked aft along the twin lines of black-garbed and masked men seated in the blood-tinted glow of the Osprey's cargo deck. Members of the ultra-secret Black Cat Bravo assault force assigned to the NSA's Deep Black program, they were the National Security Agency's premier military strike team--or would be after tonight. This would be their first operational mission.

Over the past several years of Deep Black's operational history, Desk Three agents had been limited in combat to the firepower they could carry on their person--generally a semiautomatic pistol. The standard wisdom of covert ops held that if you actually needed to use a firearm, your mission had failed.

There were times, however, when something more was needed than a sound-suppressed pistol, a means of delivering major firepower with surgical precision. Various branches of the U. S. military had such units--the Army's Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces, the U. S. Marines' Force Recon, the Navy's SEAL Teams--and Deep Black's Desk Three had worked with all of them, generally through the auspices of USSOCOM, the U. S. Special Operations Command.

But for the past two years Rubens and Charlie Dean both had been pushing for a special-capabilities unit answerable solely to Desk Three. The need had become particularly evident last year, when Dean had undertaken a Desk Three op in the Arctic far north and the takedown of a Russian ship illegally holding American personnel who'd been operating an ice cap weather station. A SEAL assault unit had taken the ship, but difficulties in command control, in communications, and between individual personnel had caused difficulties that Black Cat was designed to prevent.

The Black Cat units, Alpha on the West Coast, Bravo on the East, were the result.

Technically, the team members were, like Dean, civilians--"technically" because although the NSA was subordinate to the U. S. Department of Defense, with either a lieutenant general or a vice admiral as director, the Agency operated in a kind of twilight world straddling both the civilian and the military defense communities.

Of course, the NSA officially didn't even have a field-active component or human intelligence capabilities. Its original charter called for the Agency to handle electronic and signals intelligence--SIGINT--only, which it did by monitoring radio broadcasts, phone and satellite communications, and Internet connections worldwide.

But Desk Three existed because sometimes a human being had to place a listening device in a telephone or an intercept unit inside a computer keyboard to eavesdrop on communications. And sometimes those humans needed a lot of firepower, fast.

Hence, Black Cat.

"Cougars!" Dean called over the team's radio channel. "Switch to tank oh-two!"

The Osprey's cargo deck had already been depressurized, and every man there was breathing pure oxygen through an attachment to 02 lines along the cargo deck's internal fuselage walls. They'd been breathing pure oxygen for the past forty minutes in order to flush all of the nitrogen out of their bloodstreams. Each man now made the switch-over to his own, personal oxygen bottle, throwing a connector switch, then unthreading the aircraft supply line from their oxygen system: At these altitudes there simply wasn't enough oxygen in the air to keep a man aware and conscious for more than a few minutes.