viable insertion point was critical to the plan the three men now worked out. The success of this assault, Hawke knew, would be immeasurably more problematic should Fancha fail to reach the bridge alive.
A long, sweat-soaked hour later, Hawke shoved his chair back, put his feet up on the table, lit another of Putin’s cigarettes, and smiled at Brock and Stiglmeier.
“Yeah, okay,” Hawke said. “God help us, I think we’re finally good to go. You guys good? Everyone ready?”
“Good,” Harry said, looking down at a diagram of the pod he’d drawn on a legal pad, outlining the two teams’ plans of action. Harry would be going up with Stoke’s squad, acting as his second in command.
Stiglmeier said, “I’m good. And ready.”
“Let’s go to work,” Hawke said, looking at his watch. “You want to call a time, Jack?”
“I still like midnight.”
“Then we ride at midnight,” Hawke said, smiling at the team.
59
Fancha was ready, too. She had exactly fifteen minutes to make her way aft, down two decks to the bridge deck, get away from anyone who tried to stop her, find the control pod, and open the hatch for Stoke and his men at the stroke of midnight. She checked her watch again. If she was lucky, she’d reach the bridge a few minutes early. If she was unlucky, well, nobody blames you for being late if you’re dead.
She had Stoke’s gun and the sat phone both stuck uncomfortably in the small of her back, inside the belt holding up her black jeans. She wore her dark red blouse untucked so it would cover the two items. She had no idea what to expect once she stepped outside her cabin, but she thought having the gun and a phone in her hands was probably a bad idea when and if she encountered one of the terrorists.
She looked at herself in the mirror one last time.
“You can do this, girl, you can do this,” she said to herself, and she almost believed she could. God knew she’d said it enough times since she’d hung up from talking to Stoke.
She’d not cracked the door in almost three days, living in constant fear the terrorists would conduct a room-to- room search for her. Luckily, they’d either forgotten about her, or decided she wasn’t worth the effort. She’d had nothing to eat but snacks, sodas, and beer from the minibar. But she understood what Stokely wanted from her, how important it was, and she was determined to succeed or die trying.
She unlocked the double locks on the door, grabbed the knob, and turned it. Slowly, as quietly as she could, she pulled the door open, an inch, two inches. Someone was coming! She pulled the door shut and leaned against the wall, her heart pounding.
There had been a sound from the corridor, coming toward her from the left. Someone whistling. A woman. It sounded like one of the housekeepers. Could they really have the staff continue to clean the damn ship while people were being held hostage? Maybe even being killed? She supposed they could. This was, as Stoke had told her when they were boarding, a “tight ship.”
And these “housekeepers,” as they called themselves, didn’t look much like housekeepers. The majority of them were young, mid-twenties, blonde, and all uniformly beautiful. Ukrainians, mostly, the ones she’d talked to, but there were pretty girls of every race, creed, and color aboard. All trained to walk and talk the same, pretty much indistinguishable. The Stepford Maids, she called them.
It was some high-class form of white slavery, she supposed. Dirt-poor girls from small towns, desperate to get out. Horrible but not nearly as bad as what happened to thousands of other girls like them around the world. These women were the lucky ones; the unlucky ones got sold.
She put her ear to the door. The whistling woman was just passing by. Fancha pulled the gun from her waistband, opened the door silently, and stepped out into the hall.
“Excuse me?” she said, approaching the woman from behind. The housekeeper stopped, but before she could turn around, Fancha had brought the butt of the gun down on top of the woman’s head, swinging it just as hard as she could. She crumpled to the floor, out like a light.
Fancha bent and grabbed her under the armpits, quickly dragging her back inside her stateroom. She shut the door and locked it. She stared down at the unconscious woman, breathing hard, unable to believe she’d done this to her. She grabbed her wrist and felt for a pulse. Strong. But wait just a minute. This woman was wearing a uniform. Black satin, with a frilly white apron and a frilly white cap. The size wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough.
She bent down and started unbuttoning the woman’s blouse.
It took all of two minutes to disrobe the maid and herself and put on the housekeeping uniform. She looked at herself. She’d tucked her dark hair up under the cap as best she could. Stuck the gun and the phone inside the apron strings, where they were tied tightly in the back. Found a long black cardigan sweater in her closet and put that on. It was just long enough to cover up everything back there. She’d pass for one of the housekeepers, she thought, if nobody looked too closely, remembered her face.
There were two terry robes hanging in the bathroom. She took the sashes from both and used them to bind the unconscious woman’s wrists and ankles. She used a hand towel as a gag, tying it tightly, knotting it at the back of the girl’s head, praying it was enough to keep her quiet when she came to.
She cracked the door, saw that the dimly lit passage was empty, and headed for the stairs at the far end. She didn’t run, because housekeepers didn’t run. She tried to take her time. And tried to whistle, as they all seemed to whistle. The maid encounter had cost her precious time. But the uniform also might save her life, she thought, hurrying up the steps to the deck two floors above. Her first job was to determine if the hostages were still being kept in the ballroom. Stoke guessed they were. The terrorists would want them contained, where they could keep a close watch over every move they made.
She’d had an idea, and maybe it was a good one. First, go back through the kitchen, which she managed without seeing a soul. Next, go backstage, look for the small door that opened onto a tiny staircase leading up to the projection room. The ballroom was also where they showed movies every night. She had a hunch there’d be no movie tonight, and the projection room would be empty, and she was right.
Peering down through the tiny window next to the projector, she saw the hostages. They were mostly crowded on the floor, sleeping on blankets, although some were seated at the tables. They looked as bad as you would expect. Little food, little water, little sleep. And there were ten armed terrorists stationed around the perimeter of the room, just in case anybody got any ideas. She headed back to the kitchen and quickly made her way down to B Deck.
Stokely had told her where to find the bridge deck pod. It was the clear plastic egg she’d seen suspended from the bottom of the airship’s hull. Stoke said to go to the very center of A Deck, and there she’d find the entrance ladder down to the control pod.
B Deck aft where she was now, was mostly crew quarters. Zero decor. Pretty grim compared with the luxurious spaces above. Two jumpsuited crewmen were headed her way. Laughing, arms around each other, drunk. She took a deep breath, kept whistling, smiled at them as they approached her. The one nearest her reached out, leering, and grabbed her arm. She hissed at him, something low and threatening, and wrenched her arm away. “Asshole!” she said, giving it her native Cape Verde accent. She was clearly more trouble than she was worth. They kept moving.
She kept moving. All the way to the end of the corridor, down a set of service steps to the A Deck. Then she started back toward the middle of the ship. It was steerage down here, crew quarters even less appealing than the deck above.
“Hey! Stop!” someone called out in English as she passed an open door. She’d caught a glimpse inside and speeded up a little bit. There had been at least a couple of men in there, playing cards, it had looked like, a huge cloud of smoke over their heads, noisy, drunken laughter from inside.
“Hey! You deaf? I said stop.”
She did, her heart pounding. If she ran, he’d catch her. It would be over. She turned around.
The guy was at the door, leaning out into the hall, a half-empty bottle of vodka in his hand. He looked vaguely familiar. Oh, yeah. Happy the Baker, God help her.
“Come back here.”
“Okay,” she said, using a universal word and trying to give it a bit of an island accent. She turned around,
