'Something's happened,' he told her, sensing that she was holding something back. 'What?'
She glanced around the room. 'I think — ' She stopped. 'You can't tell the other passengers, Jerry. I don't want to start a panic. Or a massacre… '
'A massacrel.. '
She laid a hand on his arm. 'Shh! Jerry! Please!'
'Sorry. But what the hell are — '
'About four hours ago, some of us were getting worried, you know? Calls to the bridge weren't being answered. And we couldn't find some of the crew. David Llewellyn, the head of Ship's Security? We can't find him anywhere!'
Esterhausen frowned. 'Don't you guys have some sort of super high-tech ID locator on this ship? A way to tell where everyone is at any time?'
'Yes. That's why we were looking for David! The Security Office wasn't answering calls! And the passageways up on Deck Eleven, leading to Security, have all been closed off. There are armed guards up there!'
'Shit.'
'So the CD, Sharon Reilly? She said she was going up to the bridge and talk to Captain Phillips. That was four hours ago, and she hasn't come back! We've tried calling her, and she's not answering her phone. Jerry, I don't know what to do!'
Esterhausen was watching the guards outside. He nodded slowly. 'Well, the first thing, Sandy, is not to panic.'
'But what's happening? What does that ship tied up alongside have to do with us? Are they pirates? Terrorists?'
'I think,' he said slowly, 'that we've been hijacked, and the bad guys just haven't bothered to tell us yet.'
'Hijacked!'
It was Esterhausen's turn to lay a cautioning hand on Markham's arm. 'Like I said. Don't panic. There are a couple of thousand of us, and only a few of them. We can do something about this.'
'Jerry, they have machine guns!'
'Yeah. But there still can't be more than a few dozen of them. They can't possibly control all of us. And if we know what's happening, maybe we can… I don't know. Hide someplace. This is a big ship, lots of hiding spaces. We can figure out how to strike back.'
'You're forgetting something.'
'What?'
'If they're in control of security, they know where all of us are. They'd know immediately if some of us tried to hide.'
'Then we'll have to figure something out. Flight Ninety-three.'
'Flight Ninety-three? What's that?'
'Nine-eleven?'
'The World Trade Center bombing?'
'You remember the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania?'
'I'm English, Jerry. And I was a teenaged girl in Woking then.'
'Oh. Right. The terrorists hijacked four planes that morning. Two crashed into the World Trade Center. A third hit the Pentagon, in Washington. The fourth was Flight Ninety-three. It was hijacked over Ohio someplace. They turned it around and were flying toward Washington, D. C. We're not sure, but the terrorists were planning on crashing into either the White House or the Capitol Building.
'Anyway, the passengers knew something was wrong, and they used their cell phones to talk to friends and family on the ground. They learned about the WTC and Pentagon attacks, and figured out that their airliner was a part of it.
'So they stormed the cockpit. One of the passengers was heard to say, 'Let's roll.' It became a kind of a battle cry for the whole nation.'
'What happened?'
He shrugged. 'We'll never know. They broke into the cockpit. There was a struggle. And the plane crashed in a field in western Pennsylvania. Everyone on board was killed.'
'God… '
'The point is.. the passengers of that airliner refused to just roll over and be victims. They did something. And we can, too.'
He continued to watch the guards outside, his mind turning furiously.
Khalid stood behind Captain Phillips, who was leaning over the large electronic chart table at the back of the bridge. At the moment, the table's display showed in glowing blues and yellows a stretch of ocean 600 miles across. The tip of the Brittany coast of France lay 250 miles to the east, while the Scilly Islands and Cornwall were slowly receding astern, 270 miles distant.
'This is our position,' Phillips told him, pointing to the end of a yellow line stretching southwest into the North Atlantic. 'About forty-seven degrees north, about eleven degrees west.'
'I see. And how far are we from New York?'
Phillips looked startled. 'New York? New York City?'
'Yes.'
The ship's captain appeared to wrestle with this information for a moment, then used a stylus to touch the ship's current position and dragged it across the plastic surface of the map. The software automatically zoomed out until the curvature of the Earth came into view on the screen, showing the coastlines of Europe as far as Greece and Scandanavia, much of northwestern Africa, and, to the west, half of Canada and the United States, as well as much of the Caribbean.
As Phillips dragged the stylus, a yellow line extended with it, connecting the Queen's current position with Manhattan. The line bowed slightly, following the Great Circle, passing just to the south of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, then down past Cape Cod and Long Island.
'How far?' Khalid asked as Phillips straightened up.
Phillips tapped a menu box, and the answer appeared on the navigation screen. 'About twenty-seven hundred nautical miles,' he said.
'And how long will that take?'
'At fifteen knots?' He tapped out the calculation on the display and read the result. 'One hundred eighty hours,' he said. 'That's about seven and a half days.'
'A week. And how much faster could we get there if we increased our speed?'
'Increased it by how much?'
'The Pacific Sandpiper seems to be riding alongside quite well,' Khalid said. 'I propose we increase speed to, say, twenty knots.'
'I don't know if we can manage that.'
'I understand. But if we could?'
Phillips tapped out another calculation. 'Five-point-six days. Say.. five days, fifteen hours.'
Khalid's mouth worked silently for a moment. 'So, at twenty knots, we could reach New York by next Friday, sometime in the afternoon?'
'Yes. But I can't recommend that.'
'Why not?'
'I can't predict the stress on this vessel caused by dragging that freighter. And it will take a lot more fuel to move that much weight, at that much higher a speed.'
'Would you have enough fuel to make it?'
Again Phillips worked out the calculation. 'Yes.' He said the word reluctantly. 'Barely, but yes.'
'Then that is what we will do,' Khalid told him. 'Give the order, please, to come to this new course.'
'Helm,' Phillips said, his sense of dread growing swiftly deeper. 'Come to new heading… two-six-zero,
