The terrorists are well armed and the operation appears to be well planned…
Thomas Mitchell emerged from a stairwell on the Eleventh Deck forward, just down the passageway from Ship's Security. A dozen feet down the corridor was a locked steel door with security check hardware beside it — an ID card reader and a thumbprint scanner.
There was also a push-to-talk intercom that would let him request to see someone from Security, but he hadn't yet decided whether he should take that option. He was moving cautiously and once, on the way up the stairs, he'd stopped when he'd heard a door bang open far above him and waited until the sound of footsteps receded again.
Something was very, very wrong on board this ship. The more he thought about it, the more suspicious he was of that PA announcement a few moments before. He was determined to track down David Llewellyn and find out what was happening.
But he also wasn't convinced that it was a good idea to call attention to himself just now.
He heard something rustle behind him, and he turned sharply. Someone was coming around the corner of an intersection down the passageway aft, and an instant before they came into view, he ducked back into the stairwell. There was a small, square window in the door. Mitchell pressed himself up against the door and edged his head just enough to one side to glimpse movement in the passageway outside. Two figures strode past, their shadows cast by overhead fluorescents momentarily sweeping across the glass. Stepping to the other side of the window, he pushed his face up against the glass in time to see the backs of two men walking toward the security checkpoint.
Both men were wearing khaki uniforms. Both had AK-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders and had small, military-type radios clipped to their belts. One wore a black beret, the other a white and gray head cloth, an Arab kaffiyeh, held in place by the braided cord called an iqal.
The one with the beret pulled an ID card out of a breast pocket and slid it through the reader. He then pressed his thumb against the scanner, and Mitchell heard the metallic click as the steel door popped open.
Terrorists, with ID cards and thumbprints on file giving them access to Ship's Security. Mitchell reached inside his jacket and pulled out his pistol, a service-issue SIG P226, and quietly pulled the slide back, chambering a round.
Think! Think!…
If terrorists were in control of Ship's Security, they were already in control of the bridge, and probably engineering as well. The freighter tied up alongside must belong to them now as well; probably terrorists had come aboard the Queen from the Sandpiper. This operation clearly had been carefully planned and orchestrated, and must involve a large number of well-armed men.
Think it through! Think!
The Ship's Security personnel must all be dead or have been captured, if the terrorists were this much in evidence. Mitchell realized at that moment that he might well be the only free man on board the Atlantis Queen who was armed and alert to the terrorist threat. He couldn't take on the entire terrorist group… but perhaps he could get intelligence on the hijackers that would help a CT team. If he could get in contact with MI5 or military intelligence, he might be able to pass them critical information about the takeover, including the very fact that the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper had been hijacked at sea.
First he needed to find Sam Franks and bring him into this.
Carefully he began tiptoeing back down the stairs.
Chapter 15
'We're about one minute out, Mr. Rubens.'
William Rubens nodded, looking up at the large flat-panel screen dominating one wall of the Imaging Center. The room, with its high-tech collection of SPARC workstations and large-screen monitors, was located in the ultra- secure underground levels of the NRO's new headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia, one of the most highly secret offices in an entire sprawling complex of top-secret installations. It was here that real-time imagery from space was processed and displayed.
'This is from Argus Twelve?' Rubens asked. 'Yes, sir.' Chris Atwilder was an assistant director of the NRO, in charge of digital imaging. 'We put it onto a new orbit fifty-five minutes ago. We should have a good look at the site in… thirty seconds.'
Argus 12 was part of a constellation of seventeen highly classified surveillance satellites, each orbiting the Earth once each ninety minutes at an altitude of between 120 and 160 miles. Although both the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office continued to vigorously deny it, Argus — named for the hundred-eyed guardian of Greek myth — could give better than one-centimeter resolution in real time, day or night. Using synthetic aperture radar, Argus could image a basketball through any weather, making it an invaluable eye-in-the-sky shared by the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, and several other U. S. spy and law enforcement agencies.
At the moment, the screen showed a wide-angle view of the ocean, as if seen from a considerable height. The weather in the target area was clear at the moment, though the software could blend incoming data in several radar, infrared, and ultraviolet as well as optical wavelengths in order to build up a composite image of what was on the ground, peering down through clouds, fog, and all but the heaviest rain.
Though there were special secure channels by which Rubens could have watched processed feeds from the NRO back in his own office or on the Art Room main screens, he'd driven out to Chantilly after his briefing session at the White House that morning specifically to see the raw feeds as they came down from the satellite. General Ronald McLean, DIRNSA, the Director of the NSA, had personally phoned Rubens before he'd left for the White House that morning. If there was a problem with that British plutonium transport, McLean wanted to know about it yesterday. Plutonium ships made the trip from Britain or France to Japan about once a year, and the National Security Agency made each voyage a high priority. With plutonium enough on that one ship to manufacture sixty fair-sized nuclear weapons, every intelligence organization on the planet was likely keeping close tabs on it.
'We have the target on radar,' a technician reported from a nearby console. 'Cameras are slaved and locked.'
'High-speed recorders are running,' another technician reported.
And there it was, drifting across the screen from top to bottom, with blocks of technical data winking on in columns at the upper left, giving time and date, range, coordinates, and camera resolution data. The resolution was crystal-sharp, the image computer enhanced to show every detail.
'That's the Pacific Sandpiper' Atwilder said. 'What's that bigger ship tied up alongside?'
'The Atlantis Queen' Rubens replied. 'Cruise ship. She was last reported on her way to assist in SAR at sea.'
'They're lashed together. Look… you can see the hawsers.'
'And that helicopter still on the Sandpiper's forward deck,' Rubens added. 'That is odd.'
'Crewmen on the decks of both ships,' Atwilder said.
'Can we zoom in close on them for a closer look?'
'We could… but let's wait. We have only a few seconds on this pass. Once we have the whole pass recorded, we can process the imagery and give you a zoom look at anything you want, for as long as you want.'
'Understood.'
The first Argus shot of the two ships, the photo Rubens had used in his briefing at the White House, had been a single shot, one of a series designed to keep loose tabs on the Pacific Sandpiper There'd been enough anomalies in that image — the helicopter, the two ships lashed together — that McClean had ordered a detailed run with the next available Argus satellite, gleaning mountains of data at the highest resolution possible.
Still, there didn't seem to be anything overtly wrong or out of place, nothing except that civilian helicopter where it didn't belong and the fact that those two ships were lashed together and steaming southwest at ten to fifteen knots, if that double wake was any indication. The Sandpiper was on course; the Atlantis Queen decidedly
