Sea of Terror (30 page)

"May I have your attention, please?" a voice called from the PA system overhead. Llewellyn straightened in his seat, looking up and around, though he knew the speaker wasn't here. Likely, it was someone either on the bridge or in the Security Office.

The voice carried a trace of an accent and sounded cultured, well educated.

"Again," the voice continued, "we regret any inconvenience you might have suffered. The ship tied up alongside us, the Pacific Sandpiper, is carrying a very important and very secret cargo. The soldiers you may have seen on board the Adantis Queen are a part of the Pacific Sandpiper's security force.

"Because of certain problems incurred by the Pacific Sandpiper when her escort ship exploded this morning, Royal Star Line has volunteered to render all possible assistance. The soldiers are on board the Adantis Queen while we take on board some of their cargo.

"There is no emergency, and no reason for alarm. We urge the passengers of the Atlantis Queen to remain calm and, if possible, to remain in their staterooms. The dining rooms are open, however, for those of you who wish to eat.

"We do not expect the problem to last more than a very few days, and we do not expect that it will interfere with your cruise. The officers and crew of the Atlantis Queen thank you for your understanding and for your cooperation."

Llewellyn wondered if anyone in the theater was going to get to eat... or be allowed to go to the restroom. He and Tricia had been brought here hours ago, and there was no indication that their guards were going to let them take care of any bodily needs.

The hijackers apparently were determined to keep as many people among the passengers and crew in the dark as they could, for as long as they could.

He wondered how much longer they could maintain the charade, until all of the passengers were tied up down here with him.

Forward Hold, Pacific Sandpiper 47deg 14' N, 10deg 40' W Saturday, 2025 hours GMT

Abdullah Wahidi stood before the gleaming titanic cylinder and tried to get his breathing under control. The sight of the thing, looming, massive, aglow with reflections of the fluorescent light tubes overhead, filled him both with awe and with terror.

"Let's get on with it," Chujiro Moritomi said in thickly accented Arabic. He pointed. "Cut there .. . there ... and there."

Wahidi exchanged a long, nervous glance with the other Arab member of the team--a kid from the Damascus slums named Musab Bekkali--and then dropped the welder's helmet down over his face and slowly raised the cutting torch.

Allah will protect me, he thought. The thought became a mantra, repeated over and over and over again. Allah protect me! Allah protect me! Allah protect me!. . .

He struck the spark, and the torch flared to life. A scaffold had been erected for the men in front of the face of the cylinder so that they could reach the locking bars located at three points around the cylinder's cap, inside the seal. He lowered the sharp-pointed blue-white flame to touch the metal, and white light exploded, dazzling even through the heavy visor of his mask.

He didn't want to die.

Then what are you doing on this ship? The thought was defiant, even angry. You volunteered for this. You wanted to be a martyr. . . and one of Allah's blessed chosen!

Silver metal began running down the line of the seal, dripping on the deck beneath.

The reality, of course, was more complex than a hunger for the blessings of Paradise. His mother, his brother, and his sister back in Gaza would receive the equivalent of nearly ten thousand American dollars after his death-- more money at one time than they could otherwise expect to see in their entire lives.

The first locking bar was cut through. Kneeling, he began cutting the second.

But he'd been expecting his martyr's death to be instant and painless--a single, sharp shock, a bright light... and Paradise would be opened to him. His understanding of radiation, however, was somewhat limited. He thought of it as a kind of poison that would seep from the container and slowly burn him, as if by a slow, roasting fire. Mustafa Abu Sayiq, who'd first recruited him in Gaza months before, had assured him that his death would be clean and mercifully swift. At the time, that has hardly seemed important; he would be providing for his family and striking a heroic blow against the hated West in the name of Allah, the merciful, the powerful.

The second locking bar was cut and Wahidi moved to the third. Cables dangling from the ceiling had been attached to massive eye hooks on the cylinder's end, to pull the heavy lid free when the locks were cut. The ship's traveling crane had been moved and the hatch cover on the forward deck opened, so that the container could be unloaded.

These casks, Wahidi had been told, were strongly built affairs, manufactured to standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Each weighed nearly one hundred tons and was firmly bolted to the deck of the transport ship's hold to keep it from shifting during transit. Each, after its manufacture, was tested by being dropped nine meters onto an unyielding surface, immersed in fifteen meters of water for at least eight hours, and engulfed in flame at eight hundred degrees Celsius for thirty minutes. It was said that these casks could survive even the extreme pressures of the ocean's depths.

Inside those massive containers, the nuclear material was safe from just about anything Wahidi or the others could do to it. If they piled up all of the explosives they'd brought on board the Atlantis Queen and set them off at once, they might fling the cylinder into the air but still fail to breach it.

And so the contents of at least two of these forged steel canisters had to be removed from the layers of protective shielding and transported to the Atlantis Queen. Several forklifts waited on the Sandpiper's deck now to effect the transfer.

The final locking bar was cut through. Wahidi switched off the torch, and he and Bekkali grabbed hold of the handles on the cylinder's end and pulled. With a slow sucking sound, the seal was breached and the metal disk came away.

Wahidi had been expecting fire or lightning bolts or something as evidence of the radiation spilling from the breached container, but he felt... nothing. Nothing at all. He looked at Bekkali again, and the other man shrugged and shook his head. He and Moritomi stood ready with a cargo sling, getting set to begin hauling the cylinders out and up to the ship's forward deck.

The interior of the large canister was dark. Wahidi had also been expecting some sort of magical blue glow.

There was nothing. No light. No fire ... no death.

Grinning now with relief, Wahidi began to slide the first of the internal canisters out of the larger container.

Bridge, Pacific Sandpiper 47deg 20' N, 10deg 28' W Saturday, 2025 hours GMT

Alarms shrilled suddenly on the Sandpiper's bridge. Jamal Hasan, at the ship's wheel, and Abdel Ramid, beside him, both jumped at the sound, but Kozo Fuchida merely smiled.

"Radiation alarm," he said, reaching past Ramid to flick a switch. The shrill ringing stopped. "They have the first cylinder open."

"I didn't realize it would reach us herel" Ramid said. He sounded scared.

"It won't," Fuchida told him. "Or very little will, at any rate. The alarm is connected to sensors inside the ship's hold, to detect radiation leaks there. There actually will be little leakage when they transport the inner canisters across to the cruise ship."

"How much is 'very little'?" the shaken Ramid asked.

"Not enough to harm you. The inner containers are also well shielded against neutron radiation."

"Oh. That is good."

Another alarm shrilled, and Ramid switched it off, the motion almost casual.

Fuchida didn't bother telling Ramid that, in fact, the three of them on the bridge were now receiving a fairly sizeable dose of hard radiation. It wasn't enough to make them sick, not yet. That would come with accumulated exposure over a period of time ... in this case, a period of several days or even as much as a week.

And a week from now they would be at their final destination, and nothing would matter to any of them anymore.

Of course the men in the special technical unit-- Chujiro Moritomi and the volunteers from among Khalid's Muslims--were already dying.

Stateroom 4116, Atlantis Queen 47deg 08' N, 10deg 36' W Saturday, 2120 hours GMT

Nina McKay leaned against the railing of her private balcony, looking down into the night. An overcast sky and night-shrouded ocean surrounded her, but bright work lights on the deck of the smaller freighter immediately below her stateroom cast dazzling pools of light over the other ship's deck and illuminated several men working beside the open maw of one of the large deck cargo hatches.

She had a deeply uneasy feeling about all of this. Those men--many in military uniforms and carrying weapons openly--and the presence of that other ship still tied to the Atlantis Queen's side, plus the sudden, terrifying drama of that jet plane shot down earlier in the day, all of it added up to one thing: something was terribly wrong.

Nina hadn't seen the downing of the aircraft; she, Andrew, and Melissa had been in the mall on the first deck, where the only windows were huge stained-glass panels high up in the gallery's overarching walls. But she'd heard about it from other frightened passengers and from the announcement over the ship's PA. She was still shaken by that nightmare crush, by the pounding fear that Melissa might be trampled in the crowd.

Turning, Nina looked back into the stateroom, lit now by a single night-light. Melissa was asleep on the huge bed with her favorite stuffed animal, a war-weary, much-patched, much-loved gray tiger kitten, cuddled tight against her cheek. When the panic had begun, Andrew had scooped Melissa off the deck with one arm, grabbed Nina's hand with the other, and plowed his way through the press of bodies by sheer brute strength.

Andrew could be . . . dominating sometimes. He had what she'd laughingly called a white-knight complex, a need to gallop in full tilt, take charge, and fix things whenever there was a problem. It had driven her nuts throughout the eleven years of their marriage and was a large part of why she'd left him, that and his need to always know everything and always be right. She didn't like other people taking charge of her life and telling her what to do, what she needed to do to straighten out her life. It was so much ... so much like her mother. .. .

Right now, though, Nina thought she would appreciate some macho counsel, or a bit of well-meaning knight-errantry. Protecting her daughter, keeping her safe, was Nina's single driving need right now, and she had no
i.e.
how to do it. She knew something was wrong, but she didn't know what, and with all that black and empty ocean out there, she had no place safe to run.

The men on the deck of the small ship alongside were hoisting,something out of the hold--a bundle of cylinders each perhaps six feet long, dull-gleaming under the work lights like lead.

Pirates, looting the ship's cargo? It was all she could imagine, and the guns those men had slung over their shoulders made the thought credible.

Leaving the balcony, she quietly slipped across the stateroom, first checking on Melissa's quiet breathing, then moving to the door that connected them with the stateroom next door.

Very, very softly she rapped on the door. "Andrew? Andrew, we need to talk."

The door swung open a moment later.

Pyramid Club Casino, Atlantis Queen *46deg 59' N, 11deg 08' W

Saturday, 2212 hours GMT

As Jerry Esterhausen sat at the Pyramid Bar in his tweed jacket and blue jeans, watching the crowd in the casino, he was becoming more and more worried. There was something wrong.

Rosie was functioning brilliantly, dealing out the cards at the blackjack table with slick, sure precision, bantering with the customers as she did so, but the problem was that there weren't that many players. Most of the people in the casino that evening were gathered in small groups, clustered around dining tables or at the bar or within the faux jungle at the front of the room. Not even the patter of a stand-up comedian on the stage an hour earlier had lightened the atmosphere, which felt oppressive and claustrophobic.

People were scared.

At first, Esterhausen had been primarily worried that Rosie wasn't drawing in the players as CyberAge's marketing department had promised. A failure at the tables on this cruise, a lack of rich suckers willing to put their money on the table and bet they could come closer to 21 than a vivacious machine, might translate as a lack of orders for CyberAge's products, and even a cancellation of the contract with Royal Sky Line.

Sitting at the bar watching the customers, though, had convinced Esterhausen that the problem wasn't Rosie. Snatches of overheard conversation whispered about the crash of that Royal Navy jet, the mysterious activity on board the freighter tied up alongside, and the appearance of ominously garbed and armed security guards. Esterhausen turned his head to look aft through the huge glass doors and windows there, out onto the Queen's Deck Nine fantail. The ship's Atlas swimming pool was located out there, along with two hot tubs. Normally, both pool and spas would have full complements of swimmers and soakers taking advantage of the night air. There were no passengers out there at all, however, not now.

But there were two of the bearded, khaki-clad guards standing near the glass, with their black berets and black and orange assault rifles very much in evidence. They lent a sinister presence that overshadowed the crowd in the casino. Esterhausen saw how people at the tables nearby kept glancing outside, and how worried they seemed when each glance confirmed that the guards were still there.

Security guards off the Pacific Sandpiper, the announcement earlier that evening had claimed. But the Sandpiper was British-flagged, and these guys didn't look British. They weren't American or Israeli, either. Esterhausen would have guessed they were Egyptian, Jordanian, or from some other Middle Eastern nation.

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned in his bar seat as Sandy Markham sat down next to him. She looked scared, and her eyes were red, as if she'd been crying.