Sea of Terror (34 page)

"But the plutonium on board the Pacific Sandpiper is carefully packaged in one-hundred-ton canisters bolted to the cargo hold deck, in such a way that the plutonium always remains sub-critical. It might be possible to use cutting torches to remove the storage containers inside each canister, true, but the plutonium is stored as plutonium oxide, an extremely fine powder. The terrorists simply don't have the facilities to transform that powder into pure, solid plutonium. If they slapped a critical mass of plutonium oxide together, the worst that would happen would be the release of a tremendous amount of heat.. . enough heat to melt through the bottom of the ship and sink her... what became known as the 'China syndrome' back in the 1980s. There would be extensive contamination of the sea in the ship's immediate vicinity, of course, but no explosion."

Rubens could feel the others at the table relaxing. Since the beginning of his crisis, the major concern had been that terrorists were attempting to seize the Sandpiper in order to either gain access to enough plutonium to make atomic bombs or threaten the United States with the possibility of a nuclear explosion.

"Dr. Cavenaugh," he said. "What about the possibility of a dirty bomb?"

"Ah! Yes. That is one possibility we've been looking at that does appear to pose a very real threat in this situation. The plutonium oxide is already in a fine powder form, as I said. If it were to be removed from its protective containers, a sufficiently powerful conventional explosion--an explosion big enough to destroy the ship, say--might hurl most of that powder into the atmosphere, where prevailing winds would carry it out over a large footprint. Any ships downwind of the explosion would be contaminated."

"Then we will recommend that our British friends stay well upwind during their assault," Bing said.

"How big of a footprint, Doctor?" Debra Collins wanted to know.

"That depends on wind speed, humidity, and several other factors," Cavenaugh replied. "But potentially five or six hundred miles long, perhaps fifty to one hundred miles wide."

"Enough," Rubens said, looking squarely at Bing, "to blanket all of Manhattan and Long Island with radioactive dust, if they blow that ship up inside New York Harbor. That is what I want to be certain the President understands. Those ships changed course thirty-six hours ago, and are on a heading that appears to be aimed straight at Boston or at New York City, or, if they come further down the coast, Philadelphia or Washington, D. C. Our crisis assessment team at the NSA believes the enemy's target to be either Boston--it's the closest major city on the new course--or New York City.

"Right now, the Sandpiper and her cargo are nineteen hundred nautical miles from New York. That's four days at the speed they've been traveling since Saturday night. That makes it our problem as well as the Brits'."

Bing shifted uncomfortably in her chair but said, "The President has already been fully informed, and it is his decision that this situation be resolved by the British."

"We have a special operations unit ready to go in," Rubens said, "on twenty minutes' notice, but they will need approximately twelve hours to redeploy to the Eisenhower Once there, however, they would be available to provide special combat intelligence to the SAS commander on-site."

Bing appeared to consider this, then shook her head. "The President has decided that this situation will be resolved by the British."

Rubens heard the warning in Bing's voice and in the way she kept repeating her words: do not push. The harder he fought to have the NSA's combat action team included in the assault, the more deeply entrenched and stubborn Bing and her cronies would become.

He wondered, though, if the President really was dead set against U. S. forces participating in the op ... or if this was Bing's way of defending her turf. Whichever it was, Bing had just slammed the door shut on Rubens, or she thought she had.

He was not willing to concede the victory to Bing and Wehrum, however, not yet. Rubens had tremendous respect for the British SAS. They were well trained and battle-tested. Some claimed they were the equals in most respects of the U. S. Delta Force.

But Rubens knew too well that no combat op ever goes down exactly the way it was planned, and if the hijacking of those two ships was the prelude to a terrorist nuclear attack against the U. S. East Coast, he wanted to have all of Desk Three's available combat assets on the scene and ready to go.

Just in case.

Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen 48deg 32' N, 27deg 19' W Monday, 1640 hours, GMT

Carolyn Howorth carefully stepped up to the door, pressing her face against the tiny window in order to see as much of the passageway beyond as she possibly could. For two days, now, yesterday and today, she'd been "skulking," as she'd described it in her reports back to GCHQ, slipping through the huge cruise ship passageways and access corridors in an attempt to garner every scrap of information she could on the paramilitary force that appeared now to be in total control of the Atlantis Queen.

In some thirty-six hours of skulking, she'd learned quite a bit. The hijackers appeared to be Arabic speakers, though she'd heard some speak English--including a few with no trace of an accent. She'd actually seen at least twelve different men but suspected there were others she'd not seen--up on the bridge, in the Security Office one deck down, and in places like engineering and the ship's holds, all of which were barred to anyone without a properly programmed key card.

Two guards stood outside the doors leading to the ship's Neptune Theater at all times, and she'd watched other guards escort bound crew personnel and passengers through those doors and emerge again without them. The theater, then, was a secure holding area for people the terrorists needed to take out of circulation, quite possibly because they'd seen or guessed something they shouldn't have. She hadn't been able to find a way in, yet, to see how many people had been taken there, but the traffic suggested that the number was fairly high. There were probably several terrorists inside the theater as well, keeping an eye on the prisoners.

She'd come up the forward stairwell hoping to see if there was a way to get to the Ship's Security Office. The place was sure to be guarded, she thought, but if she could get inside, she might be able to learn a bit more about the size and disposition of the hijackers' force.

It was the Ship's Security systems that worried her most. The Adantis Queen was enormous, with mile upon mile of corridors, maintenance tunnels, and compartments that guaranteed that she could move around the ship unseen, if the hijackers weren't watching the Ship's Security cam screens, and if they didn't know how to use the onboard tracking system. According to Llewellyn's description of the system Friday night, passengers carrying key cards or the small tags with their embedded computer chips could be tracked by sensors inside the bulkheads. Worse, passengers without cards or tags could still be sensed--and a warning flashed to the Security Office that someone was wandering where she shouldn't without her ID.

She'd elected to carry her ID tag with her, on the assumption that with it, she was just one of some three thousand colored blips on the security monitor screens, and so might be overlooked even if she was now on the Eleventh Deck where she had no right to be, officially. If the sensors picked up a warm body moving in a restricted area with no ID, an alarm would sound, and that would bring the bad guys down on her like an avalanche.

The terrorists, clearly, had circumvented the security system somehow and were traveling everywhere-through the ship with impunity. The question was--were they using the ship's sophisticated security systems to monitor and control their hostages?

Through the tiny door window, Howorth could just see the security checkpoint in the passageway beyond and to her right, a sealed massive steel door with a card reader and a thumbprint scanner set in the bulkhead to one side. There were no guards as there were one deck up, in front of the security door leading to the bridge and radio room. She put her hand on the door handle to open it, then ducked back when she heard the boom of another door closing somewhere down the passageway to her left. A shadow passed the window, and when she edged closer to look, she caught a glimpse of a uniformed man pressing his thumb to the scanner plate, then opening the door to the Security Department.

If she could find a way through those doors, she might be able to get to the computer room behind the Ship's Security Office. But... what then? It would be more effective, actually, if she could somehow get the passwords that would let her break into the ship's computer network. Or possibly the Netguardz trapdoor might give her access.

David Llewellyn, she thought, would have those codes, or be able to get them. But she'd not seen him since Friday.

She'd been wondering if the ship's senior security officer had fallen afoul of the terrorists and been killed or marched off like the SOCA agent she'd seen outside of Connexions.

With chilling suddenness, a man's hand slipped around the right side of her head, clamping down tightly over her nose and mouth, drawing her backward as a second hand and arm grabbed her from the left, pinning her arms to her sides. Howorth struggled wildly, trying to break free, trying to kick back against the kneecaps of her captor, but her foot struck empty air as the man squeezed more tightly. She tried to scream, but the smothering hand blocked all sound, threatening to drag her into unconsciousness.

Security Office, Atlantis Queen 48deg 32' N, 27deg IT W Monday, 1641 hours GMT

"There it is again, sir," Hamud Haqqani said, pointing at the display. Khalid leaned over the man's shoulder for a closer look.

The display screen was long and narrow, running left to right, and was touch sensitive. At the moment, it was showing Deck Eleven as yellow lines on a black background, the various compartments and passageways marked with coded alphanumerics translated by an inset table. Deck Eleven was divided into two sections--the aft sundeck around the ship's smokestack aft, and the superstructure forward housing security, the computer center, and, on Deck Twelve, the bridge.

Khalid touched the screen next to the forward superstructure, and the schematic expanded. Six red dots were clustered inside the Security Office--marking Khalid himself, Haqqani, and the other four with them. Just outside of the Security Office area, however, lay a passageway and, off to one side, the service access stairwell connecting several of the upper decks forward, including the bridge and Deck Eleven. A red dot hovered inside that stairwell and, when Khalid touched the screen again, expanding the schematic further, the single dot became two pressed closely together. He touched one of the dots, and a name and ID number appeared: Judith Carroll. One of the passengers. He tapped the other dot, and his eyes opened wider when he saw the ID.

Khalid looked up. Ghailiani and another member of the security team, Mahmoud Amin Rawasdeh, were seated at the security console near the door. "You two," Khalid snapped. "We have inquisitive intruders in the stairwell next to the passageway outside. Two of them. Bring them in!"

Rawasdeh picked up his AK-47, leaning against one bulkhead, and snapped back the charging lever with a harsh snick-snack. "Alive?" he asked.

"Any way you Can get them," Khalid replied.

Rawasdeh nodded, and he and Mohamed Ghailiani hurried from the Ship's Security Office.

Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen 48deg 32' N, 27deg 17' W Monday, 1641 hours GMT

"Do not scream," the man's voice whispered in Howorth's ear as he clamped a hand down over her mouth. "I'm a friend! Okay?"

She nodded, and the hands released her. Turning, furious, she looked into the creased face of a rough-looking man in a dark suit jacket and tan slacks--probably in his forties, stocky, and with thinning hair. He didn't look much like an Arab terrorist.

"What are you doing up here?" he asked. "Who are you?"

"I might ask you the same thing."

"Mitchell," he said. "MI5." He quirked an eyebrow. "You?"

Before she could decide whether to answer or not, the door to the stairwell banged open and two men walked in on them.

The one in the lead wore a Royal Sky Line security uniform and appeared to be unarmed. The second man, with a bushy mustache and pocked skin, wore a khaki uniform with an Arabic kaffiyeh over his head, and was holding an AK-47 assault rifle in both hands.

Mitchell reacted immediately and decisively, stepping past Howorth, snapping his right arm out, hand open flat, to catch the first man beneath his jaw with the heel of his palm and slam him backward into the gunman. As the two collided, Mitchell reached inside his jacket and dragged out his handgun.

The gunman, though, was fast and strong. He knocked the unarmed man aside with a sweep of his rifle butt, smashing the muzzle down across Mitchell's right wrist with a sharp crack and sending the pistol clattering and skittering across the deck. Mitchell stepped inside the reach of the weapon, pushing the muzzle aside as he swung a vicious uppercut with his left, uninjured hand, then grabbed the gun's muzzle ^nd yanked forward, hard, tugging the gunman off-balance.

Howorth, standing to one side, thought first about grabbing Mitchell's pistol, but it had skittered to the other side of the stairwell and was balanced precariously on the top step, with Mitchell and the gunman between her and the weapon. The unarmed man was on his hands and knees; Howorth leaped at the gunman's back, grabbing his kaffiyeh and the iqal cord that held it in place from behind with both hands and dragging them down over his eyes.

The gunman spun, teetering at the
e.g.
of the steps, holding the AK with his right hand as he fumbled with his left to pull the checkered cloth off his face. Howorth raised her right leg, planted her deck shoe on the man's chest, and kicked, hard, sending the gunman, arms flailing, backward and off the top step.

He screamed going down, the cry echoing down the stairwell as he slammed into the steps halfway down and completed an awkward backward roll to the first landing below. Mitchell flew after him, vaulting into space and landing on the gunman's chest five feet below with a sickening thud. Reaching down, Mitchell pulled the AK from unresisting fingers with his injured hand while drawing his other fist back to deliver a final blow--