Helicopter Talisman One
North Atlantic Ocean
47° 48' N, 40° 46' W
Tuesday, 1843 hours GMT
“FIVE MORE MINUTES, GENERAL! Amethyst is peeling off now!” The helicopter pilot had to use his radio headset to call the information back and be heard above the roar of the rotors. The AW101 Merlin, its cargo deck crowded with battle-ready SAS troopers, screamed along less than a hundred feet above the water, and the thunder filled General Saunders’ claustrophobic world.
“Right!” Saunders called back. He looked at the men with him, black-clad, faces masked by balaclavas and gas masks, torsos swaddled in Kevlar and combat vests and equipment. It gave them an otherworldly look, alien invaders bent on destruction.
It was an image deliberately fostered by the Special Air Service, an appearance not only practical in combat but also designed to terrorize hostage takers for the mind-numbing instant of confrontation, an instant these men were trained to utilize with deadly speed and precision.
His critics, Saunders knew, would attack him for his presence here, but Alexander Saunders was not the sort of man who would send his boys in while he remained behind, safe and secure in the rear. He’d been a colonel in the SAS before his promotion to brigadier and, later, his appointment to the DSF. It was important that he be here, to make a statement, to prove that Britain still had the resolve to go toe-to-toe with evil and to win.
Saunders let his mind move through the ops plan once more, looking for anything that might have been missed, any preparations or final orders that needed to be made. There was nothing. They were ready. They were go, as their American cousins might have said.
The assault code-named Harrow Storm was deploying as two waves. Amethyst was first, four HMA.8 Super Lynx attack helicopters on loan from the Three Commando Brigade Air Squadron at Yeovilton. They’d been outfitted as gunships, each mounting two 20mm cannons and eight TOW antitank missiles. Coming up on the Pacific Sandpiper and the Atlantis Queen from astern, they were swinging off to the north now to begin their attack.
One, Amethyst Three, would go straight in, firing a wire-guided missile at the chain gun mount on the Sandpiper’s stern. The other three would swing around past the Queen’s starboard side, using the cruise ship as a shield in order to loop past the vessels’ bows and come down on the Sandpiper’s bridge house from forward. Amethyst One and Two would take out the Queen’s forward starboard and port chain gun mounts respectively, while Amethyst Four provided cover and backup, using its cannons to disable the terrorists’ helicopter and to clear the freighter’s deck and superstructure. With the chain guns out of commission, the attack helicopters would then circle both ships, using their cannons against targets of opportunity, and in particular firing into the bridge windows in order to kill the terrorist leaders. Another prime target was the A Deck cargo hold doors, which satellite surveillance imagery showed to be open at the moment, with a gangway connecting them with the Sandpiper’s deck. If those doors were closed, Amethyst Four would open them with a wire-guided missile.
Sixty seconds precisely after the coordinated attack began, Talisman Flight would reach the combat area, each carrying twenty battle-tested SAS commandos. Talisman Two’s stick would fast-rope onto the Sandpiper’s superstructure above the bridge, then move to secure the bridge and communications center. Talisman Three would do the same with the Queen’s bridge, while Talisman Four lowered its stick onto the Sandpiper’s deck immediately adjacent to the gangway leading to the cruise ship’s hold. Their responsibility would be to get onto the cruise ship and disable any explosives that might have been rigged around the transferred radioactive canisters.
Talisman One would be in reserve, sending its commandos wherever they were needed, but with special attention paid to the Sandpiper’s cargo holds forward. The op planners had felt that it was unlikely that the terrorists had planted explosives around the large one-hundred-ton canisters on the Sandpiper, because even an explosion large enough to blast the ship to bits would be unlikely to breach them. Intel from the NSA operator on board the cruise ship suggested that any explosives were there, in the Queen’s aft hold.
The plan, code-named Harrow Storm, depended on speed, surprise, and overwhelming firepower for success. If anyone on either ship had a button ready to push to detonate those explosives, it would be in the hands of Khalid himself, rather than risking premature martyrdom with a poorly trained AQ soldier. And the psych wonks had done a thorough workup on the man calling himself Yusef Khalid. He was into a power trip, they said, and would not surrender the responsibility for blowing up those ships to an underling.
He would also, they insisted, hesitate before committing suicide and ending the mission. With the ships, the hostages, and two and a half tons of plutonium, he held what he believed to be the winning hand…which, oddly enough, meant he would wait before playing it. The man, according to all intelligence reports on him, wasn’t religious; he would want more than martyrdom at sea. If the psych profiles were accurate, he wanted to sail those two hijacked ships into New York Harbor or Boston Harbor and hold them for ransom.
So the op planners estimated that there was only a 20 percent chance that Khalid would push the button before the SAS could kill him and secure the explosives.
An 80 percent chance of success was pretty good in Saunders’ estimation, better than you usually got in this business.
Less certain was the fate of the hostages on board. Some were bound to be hit when those wire-guided missiles started detonating, especially on the Sandpiper. Captains and senior officers might well still be on the bridges of the two vessels, and they would almost certainly be killed if they were. And the SAS assault teams would be first moving to secure the radioactive canisters and any explosives planted around them and worry about hostage rescue later. A lot of civilians might die. Any crew members still in the engineering sections deep in the bowels of both ships might be killed as well.
But what was certain was that all of them would die if Khalid blew up the ships and blanketed the area with a cloud of radioactive fallout, especially if his ultimate goal was to set off his bombs in Boston or New York City. The SAS troopers would save as many of the civilians as they could, but their first responsibility, spelled out most carefully in their orders, was dealing with the terrorist bomb threat, followed closely by ensuring the safety of the MOX canisters on both ships.
“Amethyst is beginning the attack run!” the helicopter pilot called to him.
“Right.” He made a fist of his gloved hand and punched the air. “Showtime, people! Let’s kill some tangos!”
The troops cheered as the Merlin transport accelerated, engines howling.
Security Office, Atlantis Queen
47° 48' N, 40° 46' W
Tuesday, 1846 hours GMT
“Amir!” Ahmad Khaled Barakat’s voice sounded calm over the intercom channel. “They are beginning an attack run.”
“Wait,” Khalid replied. “Wait! No one is to fire without my direct order!”
He was in the Ship’s Security Office, watching the approaching helicopters on a monitor displaying the feed from a camera mounted on the ship’s Deck Nine fantail, looking aft across the swimming pool there. Three of the four helicopters in the lead were angling off to the left, toward the starboard side of the Atlantis Queen. The remaining lead aircraft, plus the other four, larger and heavier aircraft, continued to approach from astern.
So predictable, he thought.
Khalid and the Operation Zarqawi planning staff had expected something of the sort, of course. The Americans and their British lapdogs weren’t about to let the Pacific Sandpiper’s cargo go without at least a show of force.
He held a microphone in one hand. “Barakat! Are you ready?”
“We are ready, Amir! We have target lock.”
“Hold steady. Track them, but do not fire!”
“Yes, Amir!”
“Shawi! Are your people set?”
“Yes, Amir! The gun ports are all open, as you commanded. We’re tracking them with the stern gun!”
“Do not fire until I give the order.”
“As you command, Amir!”
“Let me see Camera Ninety-five,” he told Hamud Haqqani, seated at the monitor immediately in front of him. That camera was located on the terrace overlooking the pool and sundeck on Deck Eleven, between the bridge superstructure and the ship’s smoke stack. The camera angle could be controlled by Haqqani from Security and was looking now out across blue water as three of the four lead helicopters flew past. The fourth was centered on the view from the fantail, steadily moving closer.
“Amir! This is Fakhet, in the radio room!” a voice called over the intercom. “They are transmitting. They say they want to check on the condition of the passengers and the crews of both ships! They say this is not an attack, and that they are willing to negotiate!”
“Ignore them,” Khalid snapped.
The enemy would be using the transmission as a ploy, hoping to get as close as possible. Those four leaders were gunships; he could see the TOW missile launchers slung from outrigger pylons to either side of each helicopter.
The three lead attack helicopters were visible in full broadside now, passing the Queen’s starboard side where the Sandpiper’s guns couldn’t reach them.
He keyed his microphone. “All stations…fire! Fire now!”
Grotto Pool, Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen
47° 48' N, 40° 46' W
Tuesday, 1847 hours GMT
“Fire now!” Khalid’s voice called over the radio in Ahmad Khaled Barakat’s earphone.
He raised his hand, then snapped it down. “Fire!”
The five men with him on the Grotto deck stood along the starboard rail, each balancing a one-and-a-half-meter-long tube over his shoulder. Three of the men fired their weapons, the back-blasts spitting bursts of white smoke across the suddenly churning waters of the pool. Three missiles leaped from the launch tubes, kicked out by small ejection motors that carried them a safe distance from the shooters before the main, solid-fuel rockets fired. They dropped a few feet before the main engines engaged, giving them an odd, swooping look as they streaked out and up toward their targets, the motors white-hot on the leading tips of their gently curving contrails.
The weapons were American-made FIM-92 Stinger shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles, a type well known to the mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan during their war against the invading Soviets. All six of the men standing behind the railing were veterans of that war. Barakat himself had stood on an icy, wind-blasted precipice north of Kabul and brought down a Russian Mi-8 helicopter with one, over twenty years earlier, and he’d trained all five of the others in their use at various camps across the border in Pakistan.
Ironically enough, it had been the American CIA that had provided these missiles, a means of striking at the Soviets through their mujahideen proxies in Afghanistan over twenty years earlier. The Americans had supplied as many as two thousand Stinger launchers to mujahideen camps in Pakistan and taught Barakat and others how to use them. Later, when the hated Soviets had at last been sent scurrying north beyond the Kotal-e Salang, the money-crazed Americans had actually tried to buy back the unused launchers.
As if Allah’s holy fighters would ever surrender such magnificent weapons!
Three targets, three missiles. The other two men stood ready, launchers balanced on their shoulders, waiting to see if the first three would find their targets or if they would need to fire more. The missiles streaked low across the water, their infrared homing sensors drawing them relentlessly toward the hot engine exhaust ports on either side of each Super Lynx’s engine.
The first Stinger struck the lead helicopter squarely in the engine just below the main rotor, the three kilograms of high explosives in the warhead detonating with a sharp flash and a spray of fragments. The aircraft staggered in mid-air, rolling to the right as its main rotor began to come apart, then plunging nose first into the sea with a vast white splash.
The other two helicopters had started to shear off toward the north, but a second Stinger missile found one of those and exploded against its fuselage as well. Smoke boiled from a hole in the aircraft’s side. The third Super Lynx released a string of flares like dazzling stars as it turned away, struggling to gain altitude. The last Stinger started to follow it up, then veered off, tracking a flare instead.
“New weapons!” Barakat yelled, pointing. “Now! And you two! Go aft! Quickly! Quickly!”
Arif and Nejmuddin, the two men who’d not yet fired, hurried toward the right, running past the white loom of the cruise ship’s smokestack. The other three dropped their empty launchers and snatched up three more. A pile of cases had been laid out in a neat row beside the swimming pool, opened and ready, all of them covered by a large tarpaulin to keep the weapons hidden from the prying eyes of American satellites.
They would reload the empty tubes later. Right now, it was faster to grab new launchers. Several BCUs, or Battery Coolant Units, rested on the deck nearby. Each man plugged a tube from the BCU into the hand guard of his new weapon, charging it with argon gas and preparing it to fire.
Over the years, many of the weapons had become useless. Those battery packs needed careful maintenance to keep them charged; the argon gas canisters sometimes leaked. But enough had been kept in working order, or been refurbished by parts brought from other sources. There were even American weapons dealers willing to break their own laws and sell fresh battery packs to Saudi buyers, for enough money.
What was it Lenin had said about selling Capitalists the rope with which they would be hanged?
Astern, there was a flash, and a missile came streaking in low above the ships’ wakes. The fourth helicopter had just fired a missile, which was arrowing straight toward the stern of the Pacific Sandpiper. At almost the same instant, Nejmuddin fired his Stinger at the hovering aircraft. Arif fired his weapon an instant later.
The trick here was to make the helicopter pilot veer off before the wire-guided missile struck its target, a deadly game of chicken. The British pilot held his figurative ground, however, dropping a string of bright-burning flares and holding his position until the TOW missile slammed into the open gun port above the Sandpiper’s fantail and detonated with a savage blast. Only then did he swing his aircraft’s nose to the right, beginning a hard turn away from the battle, but before he’d completed the turn the first Stinger streaked into the fuselage just behind the cockpit and exploded.
Barakat raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes, studying the retreating Super Lynx. The first round of the battle had certainly gone to the jihadist fighters, but only one aircraft had been shot down, and though two of the others were damaged, they were still in the air, and all three were still armed and deadly. There were also four more helicopters in the air, the troop transports, still a couple of miles out.
The battle wasn’t over yet.
Art Room
NSA Headquarters
Fort Meade, Maryland
Tuesday, 1348 hours EST
“It’s not over yet,” Jeff Rockman said, his eyes on the big screen, along with those of every other man and woman in the Deep Black ops room. Amethyst Two had just gone down into the sea.
“Yes, it is,” Rubens replied softly. “They’ve lost the element of surprise.”
On the enormous monitor filling much of the wall in front of the Art Room consoles and workstations, the battle unfolded in eerie, green-lit silence. The images this time were coming not from a U.S. spy satellite but from an aircraft currently orbiting nearly two hundred thousand feet above the North Atlantic, on the very edge of space.
Once, that aircraft had been known by the code name Aurora, and some insiders continued to refer to it as such. The actual name had been changed in 1985, when a military censor had missed the mention of “Aurora” in a Pentagon budget request to Congress, and the very existence of such an aircraft remained one of the U.S. government’s most closely guarded secrets. With pulser ramjet engines fueled by liquid methane, the hypersonic Aurora could accelerate to mach 6 and reach altitudes of sixty miles or more, qualifying the handful of Air Force pilots flying them for astronauts’ wings. This aircraft had left Groom Lake—the fabled Area 51 in southern Nevada—in the wee hours of Sunday morning, arriving at its operational airfield in Machrihanish, Strathclyde, on the tip of the Kintyre Penninsula in Scotland, just over an hour later.
From there, it had deployed out over the ocean to the targeted operational area for the past three days, tracking the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper closely. From its perch almost forty miles up, the dead-black, triangular aircraft remained invisible and unheard; its array of sophisticated cameras, imaging radars, and other senses gave observers at the NRO, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA unprecedented resolution, better even than the best views afforded by the Argus series or other spy satellites.
On the big wall display, the view had zoomed in on the flat, open deck between the Atlantis Queen’s bridge house and Deck Twelve Terrace, and the open passageways leading aft on either side of the smokestack. There was a light cloud cover between the spy plane and the ship, so the view was illuminated in greens and gray tones, a computer-synthesized blending of radar, IR, and UV imaging.
When the terrorists pulled back the tarpaulin, the Stinger missile launchers in their opened crates had been easily identifiable. So were the BCU units on the deck, bleeding cold argon gas under IR wavelengths in thin, black clouds. Three of the terrorists, seen from almost directly overhead, ran aft past the smokestack.
Voices called back and forth from the Art Room’s overhead speakers.
“This is Amethyst Three! Target lock!”
“Amethyst Three, Talisman One! Take your shot!”
“Three, firing!”
“Pull back,” Rubens said. “Let’s see the helicopters.”
The view zoomed out, the two hijacked ships dwindling to side-by-side mismatched green rectangles against a black sea. Two helicopters were turning away to the north, one trailing hot smoke, while a spreading patch of white-on-black marked the crash site of Amethyst Two. Amethyst Three was dead astern of the two ships. They watched in silence from the Art Room as a wire-guided missile streaked away from Amethyst Three toward the stern of the Sandpiper, as, an instant later, the contrails of two Stinger missiles drew white lines out from the Atlantis Queen’s superstructure toward the British helicopter gunship.
The TOW missile struck, the explosion of white fog from the back of the freighter’s deckhouse silent and sudden. Before the Super Lynx gunship could turn away, one of the Stingers struck it, the second missing and falling into the sea.
“Amethyst Three, I’m hit! I’m hit!”
“Amethyst Three, Talisman One. Break off! Break off!”
“This is Amethyst Two! I’m losing power! Mayday! Mayday!”
A second helicopter plowed into the ocean, a gentler impact than the first as the pilot tried for a controlled touchdown.
“Talisman Two, Talisman One! Get in there and see if you can help Amethyst Two! All units, break off the attack. Repeat, break off! Break off!”
“Damn!” Rockman said.
“They had no choice,” Rubens said.
“But they got the number three gun on the Sandpiper,” Sharon Tollerton said from the next console over. “They could still go in with the Merlins!”
“Not with the hijackers fully alert and waiting for them with automatic weapons,” Rubens said. “The commandos would be cut to pieces before they could fast-rope to the deck. We’ll need to try something else.”
Unfortunately, Rubens thought, the British debacle might have just slammed the door shut for Black Cat.
Pyramid Club Casino, Atlantis Queen
47° 48' N, 40° 46' W
Tuesday, 1854 hours GMT
Carolyn Howorth slipped into the casino, glancing left and right for any signs of terrorist gunmen before moving into the crowd. There were fifty or sixty people in the room, she estimated, most of them staring out through the broad glass windows overlooking the ship’s fantail. The room was dead quiet, the tension palpable.
Outside, she saw helicopters in the distance, black specks against the glare of the westering sun.
Howorth had been in her hideaway—a rather traditional place for stowaways, she thought, the interior of one of the Atlantis Queen’s lifeboats—when she’d heard the whoosh of rockets and peeked out in time to see a British helicopter shot down into the sea. She decided then that she needed to get inside and mingle with the passengers.
It had been just twenty-four hours since she’d escaped from her stateroom over the balcony railing as armed terrorists had burst into the compartment, gunning down Thomas Mitchell and Ghailiani. The man who’d opened his stateroom’s balcony door had let her into Cabin 5087, which was directly beneath hers.
The man—he introduced himself as Adrian Bollinger and the much younger woman with him as Tabitha Sandberg—had bombarded her with questions, most of them about how she’d managed to get to his private balcony outside, but she’d stopped him by the simple expedient of placing her palm across his mouth. He’d spluttered, then gone silent when she told him terrorists had taken the ship and that now they were hunting her.
“We wondered,” the Sandberg woman had said. “All those men with guns…”
“They’re going to be coming down here in just a second,” she told them. “You never saw me, okay? They’ll think I fell into the sea.”
“But where are you going?” Bollinger had asked. “You can’t just—”
“I can and I will,” she’d said, opening the cabin door and checking both ways outside. “Remember! You haven’t seen anyone!”
Bollinger turned and locked the glass sliding door. “We haven’t seen a soul.”
Howorth had made her way to a service stairway, then, and gone down one more deck. Most of the staterooms on Deck Four didn’t have balconies like the one she’d scrambled onto on Deck Five, because that space was taken up by long lines of lifeboats slung from davits.
A door opened onto the Deck Four starboard promenade, which gave her access to the lifeboats. She’d been hiding in Number 5 ever since, eating emergency rations and making herself comfortable on a jury-rigged mattress of life jackets and blankets. She needed time to think, and consider her next move.
Howorth had to assume that Mitchell and Ghailiani both were dead…though she wasn’t sure about the Moroccan crewman. She’d seen him drop to the deck when the gunmen broke in, but she hadn’t seen bullets ripping him open like they had Mitchell, who’d caught a full burst through the splintering door. It might, she thought, be a good idea to assume Ghailiani was not dead but in terrorist hands. Did he know anything about her that might help the enemy? Other than the fact of the two of them, her and Mitchell, Ghailiani didn’t know much at all.
Her ID card had been on the bedside table in her cabin. The terrorists would have it now. With luck, they’d checked out Bollinger’s cabin and assumed she’d fallen into the ocean. The only way they could spot her now was if she wandered into a restricted area of the ship, one with sensors that would pick up her movement and body heat. If she stayed in those parts of the ship open to passengers, she thought, she ought to be okay.
Her computer was gone, hurled into the sea to keep the terrorists from getting it. She was out of touch with her headquarters. Briefly she’d considered going down to Connexions in the Deck One mall and using one of those computers to contact GCHQ, but she’d swiftly dropped that idea. She’d seen them capture one man there—Mitchell’s partner—and if those computers were still online, the terrorists up in the computer center would be watching them for activity.
By transmitting the little she and Mitchell had been able to discover so far before the gunmen had burst in on them, she’d probably done all she could. The trouble was, Carolyn Howorth wanted to do more, and she couldn’t do it while hiding in a damned lifeboat.
Then the helicopters had flown up the Queen’s starboard side, missiles had lashed out from one of the upper decks and slapped one of the aircraft into the sea, and she’d heard a thunderous boom from the other side of the ship. Quickly she’d scrambled out of the lifeboat and found service stairs going up. She reached Deck Nine and headed aft, entering the Pyramid Club Casino. Alone, she would invite suspicion, or simply harassment by any terrorists who might see her. In a group, she could blend in. Each time she’d been there, there’d been passengers in the Pyramid Club, sometimes lots of them.
Attendance in the casino was way down this afternoon, but there were people. None were playing at any of the tables, however. They seemed stunned by the sudden, brief battle with the helicopters. Outside, by the Atlas Pool, two armed terrorists watched the distant helicopters circle far out over the sea.
She spotted one man sitting alone at the bar, a nerdy-looking sort with heavy-rimmed glasses and a distracted expression. Then she took a second look. He had a laptop computer on the bar in front of him and was hard at work typing at the keyboard.
A computer was definitely promising. She walked over to the bar and sat down next to him.
“What,” she asked, “are you doing?”
“Huh? Oh. Coding.”
“Coding what?”
He nodded toward a kind of kiosk at the rear of the casino, not far from the sliding doors. She blinked. The kiosk encircled a vaguely humanoid figure, a woman’s figure complete with a plunging neckline between large plastic breasts, robotic arms, and an eerie face on a TV monitor mounted where the head should have been.
“That,” he said. “Rosie.”
She’d read something about the machine in a brochure in the travel package they’d handed her at Southampton. “That’s the card-playing robot?” she asked. “The one that plays blackjack?”
“The one and only.”
“Um…I don’t know how to say this, exactly,” she said carefully, “but you do know we’ve been captured by hijackers, yes?”
“Of course. We all heard the announcement.”
“So why are you doing that?”
He stopped typing and looked up, looked around, then looked at her. “We need guns,” he said, his voice low, a conspiratorial whisper. “A way to fight back! Maybe Rosie can help us get one. She’s very strong.”
“How? She doesn’t look very…mobile.”
“She’s not. She’s bolted to the deck.” He started typing again.
“By the way, I’m Janet Carroll,” Howorth told him.
“Jerry Esterhausen.”
“Listen…I know it’s a lot to ask, but can you connect with the ship’s Internet with that thing?”
“Of course. It has a built-in router.”
“Jerry,” Carolyn said, lowering her voice in a deliberately and sexually provocative manner, “you and I need to talk!”
Forward Deck, Atlantis Queen
47° 28' N, 42° 16' W
Tuesday, 2001 hours GMT
“The attack by unknown helicopters appears to have been beaten off,” Sandra Ames said, speaking earnestly into the microphone as the freshening wind caught and tousled her blond hair. “We don’t have any more details at the time, but at least one helicopter was shot down by missiles fired from the Atlantis Queen’s upper decks, and at least two more were damaged. The rest of the helicopters—witnesses said they saw between five and ten additional helicopters off the ship’s stern at one point—appear to have left the area.”
The three of them, Fred Doherty, James Petrovich, and Sandra Ames, were standing on the forward deck under the watchful and dispassionate gaze of one of the terrorist gunmen. They were losing light fast. Doherty wasn’t sure what time zone they were in right now, so he didn’t know the local time, but the sun was approaching the horizon in a blaze of sunset color and gilded clouds astern.
“Amir Yusef Khalid, the leader of the terrorist group, gave this news team permission—it was more of an order, really—to come outside onto the ship’s forward deck and film this report. I don’t know what—wait. Amir Khalid has just come out onto the deck. Perhaps he has something to say to us on-air….”
Fred Doherty turned and looked aft, toward the ship’s superstructure. A grim-faced Khalid had just emerged onto the forward promenade. Behind him were two of his thugs carrying AK-47 rifles, and an older man, his hands bound behind his back. At the sight of the civilian passenger, Doherty felt a sharp chill that was not due to the wind.
They marched the civilian up to the ship’s railing and forced him to his knees, facing out to sea. With the camera rolling, without any preamble at all, Khalid pulled an automatic pistol from his belt and stepped up behind the prisoner. The passenger sensed the movement and started struggling, but the guards kept his arms pinned. Khalid brought the pistol up to the base of the man’s skull and pulled the trigger.
Ames screamed as the sharp crack of the gunshot echoed back off the ship’s superstructure. “Oh, my God, no!” Petrovich said. The passenger pitched forward into the railing and slumped to the deck, blood pooling beneath his head.
Khalid turned and stalked toward the camera, eyes burning with a ferocity Doherty had not seen before. Glaring into the camera, Khalid pointed back over his shoulder at the body as the two thugs lifted it between them, balanced it upright for a moment against the rail, then heaved it over the side. “That,” Khalid said, “was one of the ship’s passengers. His name was Arnold Bernstein, of Los Angeles, California. You—the governments in Washington and in London—may take comfort in the fact that we of the Islamic Jihad International Brigade are merciful and did not kill every man, woman, and child on board this vessel tonight as a result of your idiotic posturing and chest-thumping! Attempt another such attack, however, and over thirty-three hundred more people will die!
“We know you have two warships closing with us. Those ships are to keep their distance. Come no closer than twenty miles with any ship or aircraft to the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper, or we shall begin killing more passengers!”
Khalid turned suddenly and walked away, back toward the ship’s superstructure. “And cut,” Doherty said quietly.
Beside him, Sandra Ames quietly muttered, “That fucking raghead son of a bitch.”
He’d never heard her use that kind of language before.