Sea of Terror (50 page)

"I've got him," an older man said, kneeling at Dean's side. "I'm the ship's doctor." The man had his shirt off and was pressing it against the bloody abdominal wound. "Cigarettes!" he yelled. "Anyone here have cellophane cigarette wrappers?"

Several men and women offered the wrappers from their cigarettes. The doctor accepted two and slapped them over the bubbling holes, entry wound and exit wound, in the man's chest and back.

"Listen. . .," the wounded man said. His voice was weak, and it sounded like he was gargling. "Those two women ... He took them. ..."

"We saw," Dean told him. "We'll get them!"

"Sharon Reilly. Janet Carroll. Please, please . . . help them... ."

"We'll do our best."

430 STEPHEN COONTS AND WILLIAM H. KEITH Cougar Six

Aft Cargo Hold, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0534 hours EST

Coulter jumped down off the wall of boxes and jogged toward the truck. The terrorist with the firing switch lay in a fetal curl in a spreading pool of blood; emotionlessly Coulter put another 9mm slug into the man's skull, just to make sure. "This one's dead!"

"Four tangos down!" Boone called. "Team member down!"

"I'm okay," David Yancey said, rising unsteadily. He reached up under his harness, probing the heavy weave of his Kevlar combat vest, then pulled a slightly flattened 7.62 slug from the weave. "Gonna have a bruise or two, though"

"Stay put. We'll check the trucks."

He lurched to his feet, still clutching his side. "Fuck that. I'm with you."

Daniels was scrambling down off the crates. He was waving a handheld Geiger qounter in front of him. "It's hot!"

"We're copying the radiation readings here," Rubens' voice said. "Our advisor with the AEC says one man at a time, no more than fifteen minutes' total exposure for any of you. Understand?"

"Roger that," Yancey said. "Coulter! Get away from there! All of you guys, clear out. Set up a defensive position on the other side of the galley door."

Unsteadily he approached the trucks, looking for signs that the explosives were booby-trapped.

While the Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Iraq had acquired a reputation as bad boys with improvised explosive devices--IEDs--their best was rarely very sophisticated. They were proficient at planting mines that could be set off remotely, from a distance, or with trip wires, and they'd been known to pull cute tricks like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and leaving it beneath a dead or injured man, the firing lever compressed and held in place by the weight of the body Elaborate booby traps involving choices between multiple colored wires and which order to cut them in were generally the provenance of Hollywood ... and usually bad Hollywood at that.

Yancey had gone through quite a bit of training with the SEALs, in both the creation and the disarming of improvised explosives. He'd also trained for a time with the Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal people, the EOD. He approached the trucks carefully, tracing the electrical wiring by eye. There was the battery, beneath the table, a pair of wires leading up and into the back of the truck. Yanking those wires ought to be all that was needed to safe the bomb.

Ought to be. You didn't make it in the SEALs or the EOD without acquiring a bit of paranoia. He knew radiation was burning him--he couldn't feel it, but it was burning him nonetheless. Every instinct he possessed told him to yank those battery cables and get the hell out of there.

But he followed the two battery wires up onto the back of the nearest truck. The flatbed was piled high with nondescript cardboard boxes, each one holding block upon block upon plastic-wrapped block of C-4 explosives. One of the battery leads was connected to a larger cable, and that ran back through loop after loop to the firing box in the dead tango's hand. A second lead emerged from the firing-box cable and was connected to a solid-pack electrical detonator embedded in a block of C-4. Another wire connected the battery directly with the detonator. So far, so good. Arm the firing box by turning a key, press the red button, the circuit completed, the blasting cap went off, and with it went several tons of plastic explosives.

But a part of the wire directly connecting the battery with the blasting cap was hidden under a large box of C-4. He was reaching for the wire to pull it out when he stopped. In this line of work, paranoia was good.

Shaking his head, he backed off. Returning to the battery on the deck outside, he unscrewed the caps and removed the wires. The blasting cap ought to be harmless, now, its connection to the battery gone.

But he still didn't trust it.

He switched on his radio. "Art Room! This is Cougar Six!"

"Go ahead, David," Rubens' voice replied. "What've you got?"

"It's definitely rigged as an IND," he said. The acronym stood for "Improvised Nuclear Device" and referred to radiological material designed to be spread by a conventional explosion. Quickly Yancey described what he could see of the circuitry and told them what he'd done. "But I don't trust it," he said. "Part of the battery lead is hidden, and I can't get at it. Not without lifting a stack of cardboard boxes as tall as I am."

"Go ahead and get out of there, David," Rubens told him. "The SAS assault lifted off from the Ark Royal twenty minutes ago, and we have more helos inbound from the Eisenhower They should be there in another ten. We have a NEST on the way with the American helicopters."

"NEST" stood for "Nuclear Emergency Support Team," the unit under the jurisdiction of the U. S. Department of Energy tasked with responding to all types of accidents and emergencies involving nuclear material, including bomb threats.

"Roger that," Yancey said. He felt exhausted. He wondered if he was already feeling the effects of the radiation.

Before he left, though, he took another look at the back of the truck. Odd. The boxes of explosives weren't stacked neatly and squarely. Maybe that was what had been tugging at his subconscious ... the fact that several boxes were jammed in every which way, carelessly, and several were tipped up on one edge, leaving space beneath. Reaching into the back of the truck, he grabbed one of the tipped boxes and lifted it, dragging it aside.

A hand grenade had been placed underneath the box, its pin already pulled. Yancey saw the metal arming lever pop off, saw the grenade skitter across the flatbed, its three-second fuse already burning. . . .

Chapter 27

Bridge, Atlantis Queen Thirty miles south of Nantucket Friday, 0535 hours EST

khalid glowered at the night, which was just beginning to show the faintest flush of light in the east. He'd just lost touch with his men in the theater and in the A Deck hold aft. The attackers were moving too fast, too precisely, for his men to manage a coordinated defense. On the chart table he could see the blips of approaching aircraft--helicopters, most likely, from the British and American task forces that had been dogging them.

It was time to give up on the dream of setting off the explosives inside New York Harbor, of spreading death and revenge across Manhattan and much of New England. If Ra'd and the others in the hold were not answering, they must be dead . . . and Ra'd had failed to press the button on the detonator.

The booby traps set within the trucks might yet set off the entire load of explosives, would set them off if any of the attackers were foolish enough to try to dismantle the battery wires.

But Khalid still needed to make sure, and there was one way to do that.

Striding to the door leading to the radio room, he snatched up the radio and pressed the transmit key. "Ramid! Ramid, are you there?"

There was a crackle of static. Then, "I hear you, Amir."

"Execute Yar

Everything said over the radio was in code or in very carefully phrased speech; the enemy, Khalid knew well, was listening to everything. Ya was the final letter of the standard Arabic alphabet, and as the end of the series it carried the same sense of finality as the Greek omega, the English z. The ending.

"Execute Plan Ya," Abdel Ramid echoed from the Pacific Sandpiper. "Allah be praised!"

Khalid did not reply. Allah, if He existed at all, had thwarted Operation Zarqawi, as He had thwarted so much else.

Allah, if He existed, would have no part of this ending.

Cougar Six

Aft Cargo Hold, Atlantis Queen

Friday, 0535 hours EST

David Yancey saw the armed grenade bounce across the flatbed of the truck. If it exploded there, next to tons of explosives and at least one primed and ready blasting cap, sympathetic detonation would cause all of the C-4 in all three trucks to explode. He dived on the grenade instantly, scooping it up and rolling toward the open tailgate, whipping it around in his right hand as he rolled and flinging it as hard and as far as he could, even as he fell off the back of the truck.

He was aiming high, for the far side of that line of refrigerators if he could make it. The grenade exploded in mid-air before it reached them.

The explosion was piercingly loud in the cavernous metal-walled vault of the A Deck hold. Shrapnel rattled off the truck and the bulkheads and something struck his leg and his side as he fell and slammed full-length into the deck.

He lay there for a long moment, panting, rejoicing in the pain because it meant he was still alive.

Cougar Twelve

Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen

Friday, 0537 hours EST

Up past Kleito's Temple on Deck Ten, Dean led three men spiraling up the service stairwell. It had been all he could do to pull the others from the theater and lead them up here. CJ and the other woman might be killed as soon as their value as hostages was outweighed by the trouble they caused . .. and knowing CJ, she was capable of plenty of trouble. But Rubens had ordered Dean to play it by the book, and the book said to gain control of the ship's bridge, where the terrorist commander would almost certainly be trying to put together a last-ditch defense of the hijacked vessel.

Dean decided he would have to trust that CJ would take care of herself.

But, damn it, she was a desk jockey, a computer geek, not a trained field agent.

At Deck Eleven, someone with an AK-47 opened fire from above, loosing an entire magazine on full auto down the stairs.

Brisard had brought along Dean's H&K, combat harness, vest, and helmet, and he'd pulled those on over his civilian clothing, giving him an oddly mismatched look with his jeans and tennis shoes. Snapping a fresh mag into his H&K, he loosed a burst up the stairwell. The tango responded with another burst of AK fire, bullets screeching wildly as they ricocheted off steel railings, steps, and bulkheads. Tim Morgan cursed as a fragment off a vailing scratched his face, leaving a thin trail of blood.

"Where are they?" Dean asked Rubens, sheltering under the steps. "And how many?" The bad guys could hold them pinned here all day.

"You have four people in the Security-IT suite, Deck Eleven," Rubens told him. "There are six on Deck Twelve. That's three on the bridge, two in the radio room, and one in the stairwell above you. Five more are outside, on Deck Eleven, further aft."

"Waiting to ambush us between the casino and here," Dean said. "What about the two guys who left the theater?"

"We're tracking them. One is taking the two women down a passageway on Deck Four. He might be looking for a stateroom. The other is going up the Grand Staircase, passing Deck Five now. We're tracking them both." There was a hesitation. "One tango left Security a few minutes ago. You just missed him by a few seconds. He went down the stairwell you're in now. Deck Ten."

Dean tried to hold the described positions in his mind, a three-dimensional map of the enemy's positions. On the one hand, having the Art Room peering into the ship and identifying the locations of each person on board did a lot to lift the age-old fog of war.

On the other hand, it was damned tough to keep track of it all. "What about our people in the hold?"

"The situation there is under control." Rubens sounded stressed as he said it, though, and Dean wondered what he was hiding. "Helicopters are inbound, about ten minutes out. A NEST is on board."

"Okay, then," Rubens said. "Throw the switch."

"Done. ..."

By injecting the HTML code into the Atlantis Queen's computer system, the Art Room had turned all of the computers in the ship's IT section into zombies--that was what the techies called them--and admin control now rested with the Art Room. Not only did they have control of the security cameras and computer displays, but they also had control over every one of the automated door locks on the ship, all of which normally were programmed from the IT department but which now were being controlled by Rubens' team at Fort Meade.

They'd just locked every key-card door on the ship.

Another burst of gunfire thundered down the stairwell. Dean slapped Henderson on the shoulder. "Hit him with the frag-12s."

Sam Henderson, a former Army Special Forces staff sergeant, nodded and pressed the release catch for the ammo drum on his AA-12 combat shotgun. Dropping the 32-round drum with its normal load-out of 12-gauge shot, he pulled out a smaller, 20-round drum loaded with frag-12 rounds.

The frag-12 had been developed especially for combat shotguns, a 19mm grenade with four tiny, curved stabilizing fins that unfolded as it left the weapon's muzzle. The armor-piercing versions could blast through a half inch of steel plate, and a barrage of the deadly little slugs fired at three hundred rounds per minute created a firestorm of death and devastation.

Henderson chambered the first round. Dean leaned out from under the cover provided by the steps overhead and opened fire with his H&K, spraying wildly to make the gunman overhead duck back. Henderson stepped past Dean, raised his AA-12, and fired a long burst of frag-12s into the upper level. Explosions cracked and banged overhead, and someone screamed as an AK-47 bounced and clattered down the steel steps. Henderson fired another high-explosive burst, and then Dean and the others pounded up the stairs.

The tango lay on the deck in front of a partially wrecked door, covered with blood and trying to pull a pistol from his belt. Dean shot him twice in the head and kept moving.