The terrorist, he saw now, was not one of the two who'd broken in on the two of them in her stateroom yesterday. This one was young, with little more than fuzz on his cheeks instead of the beards or heavy mustaches sported by most of the others.
It was tough to see their captors as individuals. The guns, the attitudes, the broken English all combined to turn them into faceless, threatening shadows.
But there were differences. That one, for instance, was almost painfully young, and he seemed to be treating Tricia with a measure of deference. The two who'd captured them — especially the leering one — had been quite different. There was an interesting difference. The leering terrorist had been all but drooling over the attractive women; that kid looked like he was almost afraid of them. From what Llewellyn knew of Arab, cultures, there was a tendency to treat women as second-class citizens… but the teachings of their Qur'an, he'd heard, tended to stress women's equality. Most of the Muslim men he'd known in England seemed to think of women as almost their equals; he suspected that the real difference lay not in the religion but in the myriad native cultures beneath the Islamic overlay, in peoples as mutually alien as Moroccans, Egyptians, Syrians, and Afghans.
This lot seemed pretty diverse. Ghailiani was Moroccan. He thought Khalid might be Egyptian… or possibly Saudi. Was there a way to use that, to drive wedges between their individual captors?
Was that what Tricia was doing?
She glanced his way and caught his gaze. He saw again the anger flash in her eyes.
Maybe, he thought, they should be thinking about the wedges driven in between the individual captives instead. He didn't like to think it, but it might be necessary to be careful when it came time to sharing escape plans with the others.
The guard said something and Tricia laughed
Khalid leaned over the electronic chart table and drew the line again, just to be certain. He nodded, satisfied, then looked up at Aziz. 'Is everything ready?'
'Yes, Amir.' He nodded toward the bridge window. On the Atlantis Queen's forward deck, two lonely figures stood next to the starboard side railing. 'As you ordered.'
'Bring him here, then.'
Aziz left the bridge and returned a few moments later, leading Phillips at gunpoint. He watched the captain's eyes as the man saw him standing next to the chart, saw those eyes widen ever so slightly. He's afraid. Good…
'Perhaps, Captain, you would be so good as to explain something to me.'
'Perhaps you would tell me what you are doing with my people! Your thugs just came up and dragged Jason out of the wardroom.'
'First, Captain,' Khalid snapped, 'you will tell me why you tampered with the compass this morning!'
'I… I told you. It needed to be calibrated.'
Khalid sighed. 'Captain Phillips… do I look stupid? Or do you simply assume Arabs don't understand technology?' He touched a control on the chart table, and a yellow line drew itself across the curve of the Earth's globe, sliding just south of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the hook of Cape Cod, before coming to a halt a few miles south of Long Island and the entrance to New York Harbor. 'This is the course I ordered you to set.'
He touched the control again and drew a second line, one that diverged slightly from the first, to the north, a line that diverged farther and farther as the miles slipped past until it came to a halt smack against the coastline of Newfoundland, well to the north of Cape Race.
'And this is the course you recalibrated for us this morning. Do you notice a difference in our destination?'
Phillips said nothing, his jaw tightening.
'Did you think I would fail to notice, Captain? Your change would have put us over a hundred miles too far north. Were you planning some sort of distraction, to keep us from realizing you were attempting to run these ships aground?'
'Please, Amir Khalid,' Phillips said. His voice quavered just a bit. 'Please. I'm afraid that… that you intend to use these ships as a weapon, somehow. An attack on New York City. If that's true, my passengers and crew are dead no matter what.'
Khalid seemed to consider this. 'Come here,' he said after a moment. 'Look out the window. What do you see?'
Phillips looked out over the forward deck. Hijazi had the prisoner on his knees, facing away from him, his hands zip-stripped behind his back. 'Who… who is that?'
'That is one of your helmsmen, Captain. Jason Miller. He was at the wheel, I believe, when you changed the compass.'
Khalid pulled a handheld radio from a belt holster, pressed the send key, and said something in Arabic.
'Wait!' Phillips said. 'Please — '
A sharp crack sounded from outside, the shot slightly muffled by distance and the glass. Jason Miller flopped forward, striking the ship's railing, then slumped back in an untidy huddle at his executioner's feet. The gunman slung his AK, then proceeded to lift Miller's body up, press it against the railing, and topple it over and into the sea far below.
'You murderer!' Phillips snarled, turning suddenly from the bloody scene. Several of Khalid's men on the bridge stepped forward, weapons coming up.
'Do you wish to die as well, Captain?'
Phillips stopped in mid-stride, his fists clenched, breathing hard.
'If you wish, I will kill you as well, and bring your second in command up here in your place.' His head cocked to one side. 'Or… it may even be that I don't need you any longer. The ship continues to run smoothly and well. It will be simple enough to get it back on its proper course.' He paused, as though thinking about it. 'I choose to let you live for the moment, Captain,' he said at last. 'I may have need of you when we reach New York.'
Reaching for a small device in a second holster on his belt, he extracted a handheld GPS receiver. 'I have my own means of determining our position, Captain. And I can easily compare this with the numbers on your various instruments here. I can read a map, and some of my people are quite good with computers.
'In short, Captain Phillips, this operation has been most carefully planned and orchestrated. We know what we are doing. Do not attempt to trick me again! Do you understand?'
Phillips said nothing.
'I said, do you understand? Or shall I bring another member of your crew onto the forward deck? How many must I shoot before you obey me?'
'All right! All right! I understand!'
'Good.' He looked at Aziz and jerked his head. 'Take him back to his room,' he said in Arabic.
When Phillips was gone, Khalid stood for a moment looking out over the ocean. Five more days and then it would be over. It was going to be hard keeping the majority of the crew and passengers ignorant of what was happening.. and sooner or later they would find out or figure it out, and then it would be a matter of keeping them all cowed.
Just five more days…
And then none of it would matter anymore.
Chapter 18
'The President,' Dr. Bing said, 'was most emphatic. Both ships belong to Great Britain. The problem is theirs as well.'
