Sea of Terror (31 page)

"What's wrong, Sandy?"

"Hi, Jerry," she said. "I... I'm not sure. Things are kind of crazy."

He nodded toward the glass doors. "You mean with those armed thugs on board?"

"Among other things."

"Something's happened," he told her, sensing that she was holding something back. "What?"

She glanced around the room. "I think--" She stopped. "You can't tell the other passengers, Jerry. I don't want to start a panic. Or a massacre. ..."

"A massacrel .. ."

She laid a hand on his arm. "Shh! Jerry! Please!"

"Sorry. But what the hell are--"

"About four hours ago, some of us were getting worried, you know? Calls to the bridge weren't being answered. And we couldn't find some of the crew. David Llewellyn, the head of Ship's Security? We can't find him anywhere!"

Esterhausen frowned. "Don't you guys have some sort of super high-tech ID locator on this ship? A way to tell where everyone is at any time?"

"Yes. That's why we were looking for David! The Security Office wasn't answering calls! And the passageways up on Deck Eleven, leading to Security, have all been closed off. There are armed guards up there!"

"Shit."

"So the CD, Sharon Reilly? She said she was going up to the bridge and talk to Captain Phillips. That was four hours ago, and she hasn't come back! We've tried calling her, and she's not answering her phone. Jerry, I don't know what to do!"

Esterhausen was watching the guards outside. He nodded slowly. "Well, the first thing, Sandy, is not to panic."

"But what's happening? What does that ship tied up alongside have to do with us? Are they pirates? Terrorists?"

"I think," he said slowly, "that we've been hijacked, and the bad guys just haven't bothered to tell us yet."

"Hijacked!"

It was Esterhausen's turn to lay a cautioning hand on Markham's arm. "Like I said. Don't panic. There are a couple of thousand of us, and only a few of them. We can do something about this."

"Jerry, they have machine guns!"

"Yeah. But there still can't be more than a few dozen of them. They can't possibly control all of us. And if we know what's happening, maybe we can ... I don't know. Hide someplace. This is a big ship, lots of hiding spaces. We can figure out how to strike back."

"You're forgetting something."

"What?"

"If they're in control of security, they know where all of us are. They'd know immediately if some of us tried to hide."

"Then we'll have to figure something out. Flight Ninety-three."

"Flight Ninety-three? What's that?"

"Nine-eleven?"

"The World Trade Center bombing?"

"You remember the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania?"

"I'm English, Jerry. And I was a teenaged girl in Woking then."

"Oh. Right. The terrorists hijacked four planes that morning. Two crashed into the World Trade Center. A third hit the Pentagon, in Washington. The fourth was Flight Ninety-three. It was hijacked over Ohio someplace. They turned it around and were flying toward Washington, D. C. We're not sure, but the terrorists were planning on crashing into either the White House or the Capitol Building.

"Anyway, the passengers knew something was wrong, and they used their cell phones to talk to friends and family on the ground. They learned about the WTC and Pentagon attacks, and figured out that their airliner was a part of it.

"So they stormed the cockpit. One of the passengers was heard to say, 'Let's roll.' It became a kind of a battle cry for the whole nation."

"What happened?"

He shrugged. "We'll never know. They broke into the cockpit. There was a struggle. And the plane crashed in a field in western Pennsylvania. Everyone on board was killed."

"God. ..."

"The point is .. . the passengers of that airliner refused to just roll over and be victims. They did something. And we can, too."

He continued to watch the guards outside, his mind turning furiously.

Bridge, Atlantis Queen 46deg 59' N, 11deg 08' W

Saturday, 2212 hours GMT

Khalid stood behind Captain Phillips, who was leaning over the large electronic chart table at the back of the bridge. At the moment, the table's display showed in glowing blues and yellows a stretch of ocean 600 miles across. The tip of the Brittany coast of France lay 250 miles to the east, while the Scilly Islands and Cornwall were slowly receding astern, 270 miles distant.

"This is our position," Phillips told him, pointing to the end of a yellow line stretching southwest into the North Atlantic. "About forty-seven degrees north, about eleven degrees west."

"I see. And how far are we from New York?"

Phillips looked startled. "New York? New York City?"

"Yes."

The ship's captain appeared to wrestle with this information for a moment, then used a stylus to touch the ship's current position and dragged it across the plastic surface of the map. The software automatically zoomed out until the curvature of the Earth came into view on the screen, showing the coastlines of Europe as far as Greece and Scandanavia, much of northwestern Africa, and, to the west, half of Canada and the United States, as well as much of the Caribbean.

As Phillips dragged the stylus, a yellow line extended with it, connecting the Queen's current position with Manhattan. The line bowed slightly, following the Great Circle, passing just to the south of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, then down past Cape Cod and Long Island.

"How far?" Khalid asked as Phillips straightened up.

Phillips tapped a menu box, and the answer appeared on the navigation screen. "About twenty-seven hundred nautical miles," he said.

"And how long will that take?"

"At fifteen knots?" He tapped out the calculation on the display and read the result. "One hundred eighty hours," he said. "That's about seven and a half days."

"A week. And how much faster could we get there if we increased our speed?"

"Increased it by how much?"

"The Pacific Sandpiper seems to be riding alongside quite well," Khalid said. "I propose we increase speed to, say, twenty knots."

"I don't know if we can manage that."

"I understand. But if we could?"

Phillips tapped out another calculation. "Five-point-six days. Say .. . five days, fifteen hours."

Khalid's mouth worked silently for a moment. "So, at twenty knots, we could reach New York by next Friday, sometime in the afternoon?"

"Yes. But I can't recommend that."

"Why not?"

"I can't predict the stress on this vessel caused by dragging that freighter. And it will take a lot more fuel to move that much weight, at that much higher a speed."

"Would you have enough fuel to make it?"

Again Phillips worked out the calculation. "Yes." He said the word reluctantly. "Barely, but yes."

"Then that is what we will do," Khalid told him. "Give the order, please, to come to this new course."

"Helm," Phillips said, his sense of dread growing swiftly deeper. "Come to new heading ... two-six-zero, please."

"Coming to new heading two-six-zero, Captain. Aye, aye."

The helmsman put the wheel over, and the liner slowly began to
e.g.
onto her new course.

After several moments, the helmsman announced, "We're on new course two-six-zero, sir."

"Increase speed ... slowly ... to two-zero knots."

"Coming to two-zero knots, slowly, Captain. Aye, aye."

God, what did this man want with them, steering a course for New York City?

The Pacific Sandpiper was carrying radioactive nuclear material. The men who'd captured both vessels were obviously Islamic fanatics.

The only conclusion Phillips could imagine was that these men intended an attack against New York City, a nuclear attack, an attack that would make the horror of 9/11 pale by comparison.

And Captain Phillips realized now that he might well have to choose between trying to save his crew and passengers .. . and saving New York City.

Chapter 17

Cabin 27, Pacific Sandpiper North Atlantic 47deg 11' N, 14deg 57'W Sunday, 0920 hours GMT

kozo fuchida sat next to Moritomi's bunk. "There are doctors on the other ship," he said earnestly. "They might be able to help."

"There is a doctor on this ship," Moritomi replied. "Believe me, my friend. There is nothing any of them can do."

Chujiro Moritomi had begun showing signs of radiation poisoning only hours after the radioactive canisters had been transferred to the passenger ship. His face was flushed; the skin of his hands and arms was red and shiny, as though he'd received a bad sunburn. During the night he'd started vomiting. Fuchida didn't understand the science of it. That had been Moritomi's area of expertise, since he'd worked for several years at the Rokkasho nuclear plant. "I thought you had to breathe the powder to be hurt by it," Fuchida said.

The principal danger inherent in those metal tubes of plutonium oxides, Fuchida had been told, came with breathing the stuff, which had been described as the most toxic material known to man. Conventional high explosives would throw a cloud of dust into the air above Manhattan, and prevailing winds would carry the stuff in a deadly footprint up the New England coast.

But apparently those cylinders were leaking fairly high levels of gamma radiation as well, radiation enough to cook any unprotected individual who handled them.

"We weren't told .. . everything," Moritomi said. "The Arabs were terrified. They thought the radiation would kill them right away." He started coughing, and a smear of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. "They're going to wish it had been right away."

"Khalid lied to us?"

"He may simply not have known what to expect. Or perhaps some of those cylinders hold something more concentrated, more deadly, than simple MOX powder, and our intelligence wasn't good enough." He shrugged. "None of it matters now, of course."

Fuchida's gaze slipped to the small table beside Moritomi's bunk, which was empty except for the compact deadliness of a Walther P5 pistol. "Of course."

"Our omi," the sick man said, "remains."

Fuchida nodded. He touched Moritomi's shoulder. "I'll be back to check on you after a while."

Moritomi didn't answer, and Fuchida wondered if he'd fallen asleep. Fuchida let himself out of the cabin, one of the single berthing compartments for the ship's officers, quietly.

But as he was walking away down the passageway, he heard a single loud, sharp shot from the room.

Bridge, Atlantis Queen North Atlantic 47deg 11' N, 14deg 57' W Sunday, 0940 hours GMT

Captain Phillips and helmsman Jason Miller walked back onto the bridge, escorted by the terrorist Khalid had called Aziz. Phillips felt dirty and tired; he'd gotten little sleep the night before.

Since the takeover of his bridge almost twenty-four hours earlier, Miller, Phillips, and four others of his regular bridge crew personnel had been kept imprisoned in the officer's wardroom aft of the bridge. An adjoining bunkroom used by duty officers served for sleeping and hygienic considerations, and members of the ship's catering staff brought meals--under guard--up from the forward galley.

Staff Captain Vandergrift, four more bridge officers, eight security and ship's computer personnel, and two surviving radio operators had all... vanished. Khalid had ordered them taken away at gunpoint, and, so far, Phillips had been unable to learn what had become of them.

As the hours passed, their safety weighed more and more heavily in his thoughts.

Apparently, the hijackers were determined to keep the bulk of the ship's passengers and crew in the dark concerning what had happened. The armed guards wore military-style uniforms, and a few were wearing shipboard security uniforms. Khalid or one of his men made occasional intercom announcements from the bridge or radio room, announcements crafted to convince the floating city of the Queen that all was well, that the Atlantis Queen was rendering assistance to a vessel in distress, that the ship soon would be back on her regular course.

"Good morning, Captain," Khalid said as Phillips was led onto the bridge. He was standing next to the electronic chart table. "And it is a good morning, I assure you."

Miller replaced Fisher, another regular bridge crewman, at the helm. Aziz led Fisher back toward the wardroom.

"Where are my people?" Phillips asked, blunt. "The rest of my bridge crew?" His questions yesterday had been ignored, but he was determined to push the issue as far as he could.

"They are safe, Captain," Khalid told him. "Safe and being well looked after. We no longer need them on the bridge, and they would just be in the way."

"And there are some other of my people I haven't seen. David Llewellyn, my chief security officer. Where is he?"

"Safe, Captain."

"Their safety is my principal responsibility," Phillips said. "I want to see that they're all right."

"In time, Captain. In time. For now, your principal responsibility is the safe navigation of this ship. And to obey my orders."

"What is it you want of me?"

Khalid gave a negligent wave. "Run the ship. Continue as if nothing was happening out of the ordinary."

"And my crew?"

"Later, Captain Phillips. After I know whether or not you can be trusted."

Phillips sagged a bit inside. He could push the issue no further.

Khalid, he saw, still wore the blue and white shipboard security uniform he'd been wearing when he took over the bridge, as did several of his men.

This hijacking, Phillips had decided, had been an enormous undertaking. It had taken a lot of money--that French helicopter demonstrated that--as well as a lot of planning, preparation, and advance work. Poor Darrow's murder, he now realized, must have been planned to help the hijackers get on board, and the terrorists had shown an astonishing knowledge not only of the Ship's Security systems but of shipboard routine as well.

His face darkened with a scowl. One of the regular security officers, Mohamed Ghailiani, evidently had been a mole, the means by which these armed thugs had gotten on board in the first place and penetrated Ship's Security.