hundred or so — a few passengers but mostly men and women wearing Royal Sky uniforms. Perhaps twenty or thirty wore security uniforms; clearly, the hijackers had spent the afternoon rounding up shipboard security personnel and anyone else who might pose a problem. All of them, like him and Tricia, were bound hand and foot, and gagged, and all were clustered in the front-center few rows of seats, just below the stage. There were four men in khaki uniforms and carrying AK-47 assault rifles stationed in the balconies, giving them a perfect view of their prisoners.
Llewellyn was trying to think the situation through. This was a hijacking, obviously enough. Their captors looked Middle Eastern, and the Russian-made weapons suggested they were from one or several of the old Soviet Union's Arab clientele. Al-Qaeda, perhaps? Or Hamas? There was no way to tell. Whoever they were, they continued to bring people into the theater, singly or in small groups.
He heard a door bang far up the aisle behind him and turned in his seat, trying to see. A soldier was walking down the aisle, guiding a woman with a grip on her upper arm. Llewellyn's eyes widened slightly when he recognized her as Sharon Reilly, the ship's Cruise Director, her normally perfectly coiffed blond hair in disarray, her expression one of sheer fury. She struggled against the man's grip, her hands bound behind her back, but the guard forced her along quickly, bringing her down the aisle to the row where Llewellyn was sitting. 'Let go of me, you bastard!' Reilly said, her voice piercing in the otherwise silent theater.
Roughly the soldier shoved her into the seat next to Llewellyn's, and she landed heavily against his shoulder. Twisting, she tried to kick the soldier, but he laughed and grabbed her ankles, pinned them with one hand, and fished inside a combat-vest pouch for another zip strip.
'No… no!…'
With a slick, practiced motion, the soldier tied her ankles together, dropped her feet, and then pulled a strip of cloth out of another pouch. 'Quiet, whore,' he told her, reaching to tie the gag around her head.
With a sick shock of recognition, Llewellyn recognized the soldier as the leering one of the two men who'd broken in on him and Tricia. The soldier finished knotting the cloth behind Reilly's head, then grabbed her jaw and turned her face toward his, just inches away. 'You just wait, whore,' he told her, his accent thick. Releasing her chin, he dropped his hand to her thigh, nakedly exposed as her short skirt rode up on her hips. 'Wait, and maybe we have much fun in later.' His eyes shifted to meet Llewellyn's. 'So now you getting two girlfriends, eh?' Reaching across in front of Llewellyn, he grabbed Tricia's left breast and squeezed, eliciting a muffled yelp through her gag. 'Enjoy yourselves good!' Chuckling, he turned and strode back up the theater aisle. Reilly struggled for a moment, then slumped in resignation.
'May I have your attention, please?' a voice called from the PA system overhead. Llewellyn straightened in his seat, looking up and around, though he knew the speaker wasn't here. Likely, it was someone either on the bridge or in the Security Office.
The voice carried a trace of an accent and sounded cultured, well educated.
'Again,' the voice continued, 'we regret any inconvenience you might have suffered. The ship tied up alongside us, the Pacific Sandpiper, is carrying a very important and very secret cargo. The soldiers you may have seen on board the Adantis Queen are a part of the Pacific Sandpiper's security force.
'Because of certain problems incurred by the Pacific Sandpiper when her escort ship exploded this morning, Royal Star Line has volunteered to render all possible assistance. The soldiers are on board the Adantis Queen while we take on board some of their cargo.
'There is no emergency, and no reason for alarm. We urge the passengers of the Atlantis Queen to remain calm and, if possible, to remain in their staterooms. The dining rooms are open, however, for those of you who wish to eat.
'We do not expect the problem to last more than a very few days, and we do not expect that it will interfere with your cruise. The officers and crew of the Atlantis Queen thank you for your understanding and for your cooperation.'
Llewellyn wondered if anyone in the theater was going to get to eat… or be allowed to go to the restroom. He and Tricia had been brought here hours ago, and there was no indication that their guards were going to let them take care of any bodily needs.
The hijackers apparently were determined to keep as many people among the passengers and crew in the dark as they could, for as long as they could.
He wondered how much longer they could maintain the charade, until all of the passengers were tied up down here with him.
Abdullah Wahidi stood before the gleaming titanic cylinder and tried to get his breathing under control. The sight of the thing, looming, massive, aglow with reflections of the fluorescent light tubes overhead, filled him both with awe and with terror.
'Let's get on with it,' Chujiro Moritomi said in thickly accented Arabic. He pointed. 'Cut there.. there… and there.'
Wahidi exchanged a long, nervous glance with the other Arab member of the team — a kid from the Damascus slums named Musab Bekkali — and then dropped the welder's helmet down over his face and slowly raised the cutting torch.
Allah will protect me, he thought. The thought became a mantra, repeated over and over and over again. Allah protect me! Allah protect me! Allah protect me!…
He struck the spark, and the torch flared to life. A scaffold had been erected for the men in front of the face of the cylinder so that they could reach the locking bars located at three points around the cylinder's cap, inside the seal. He lowered the sharp-pointed blue-white flame to touch the metal, and white light exploded, dazzling even through the heavy visor of his mask.
He didn't want to die.
Then what are you doing on this ship? The thought was defiant, even angry. You volunteered for this. You wanted to be a martyr… and one of Allah's blessed chosen!
Silver metal began running down the line of the seal, dripping on the deck beneath.
The reality, of course, was more complex than a hunger for the blessings of Paradise. His mother, his brother, and his sister back in Gaza would receive the equivalent of nearly ten thousand American dollars after his death — more money at one time than they could otherwise expect to see in their entire lives.
The first locking bar was cut through. Kneeling, he began cutting the second.
But he'd been expecting his martyr's death to be instant and painless — a single, sharp shock, a bright light… and Paradise would be opened to him. His understanding of radiation, however, was somewhat limited. He thought of it as a kind of poison that would seep from the container and slowly burn him, as if by a slow, roasting fire. Mustafa Abu Sayiq, who'd first recruited him in Gaza months before, had assured him that his death would be clean and mercifully swift. At the time, that has hardly seemed important; he would be providing for his family and striking a heroic blow against the hated West in the name of Allah, the merciful, the powerful.
The second locking bar was cut and Wahidi moved to the third. Cables dangling from the ceiling had been attached to massive eye hooks on the cylinder's end, to pull the heavy lid free when the locks were cut. The ship's traveling crane had been moved and the hatch cover on the forward deck opened, so that the container could be unloaded.
These casks, Wahidi had been told, were strongly built affairs, manufactured to standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Each weighed nearly one hundred tons and was firmly bolted to the deck of the transport ship's hold to keep it from shifting during transit. Each, after its manufacture, was tested by being dropped nine meters onto an unyielding surface, immersed in fifteen meters of water for at least eight hours, and engulfed in flame at eight hundred degrees Celsius for thirty minutes. It was said that these casks could survive even the extreme pressures of the ocean's depths.
Inside those massive containers, the nuclear material was safe from just about anything Wahidi or the others could do to it. If they piled up all of the explosives they'd brought on board the Atlantis Queen and set them off at once, they might fling the cylinder into the air but still fail to breach it.
And so the contents of at least two of these forged steel canisters had to be removed from the layers of protective shielding and transported to the Atlantis Queen. Several forklifts waited on the Sandpiper's deck now to effect the transfer.
The final locking bar was cut through. Wahidi switched off the torch, and he and Bekkali grabbed hold of the
