'How? The satellite phone network has been disabled!'
'This is shortwave radio,' Abdul Agami Fakhet replied from the radio room, one deck above. 'It's coming over the scanner.'
'Let me hear.'
Khalid heard a rustle, and a burst of static as Fakhet turned up the gain on the radio scanner. 'To any station hearing this call,' a voice said, crisp and close. 'Mayday, mayday, mayday…'
'Can you tell where the call is coming from?'
'No, sir. Somewhere on board.'
Khalid thought it through. Passengers wouldn't have shortwave radios. It had to be a crew member somewhere, perhaps down in engineering. A Deck or below, certainly.
In fact, it scarcely mattered. He'd hoped that the implementation of the next phase of Operation Zarqawi might be put off a little longer, but everyone in the IJI command group had acknowledged that the assault team would have to come out into the open sooner rather than later… perhaps as early as today, certainly by tomorrow.
But another rat in the walls. With so few men to call upon, Khalid felt as though he were engaged in a colossal juggling act, trying to keep a dozen balls in the air at once.
And the first of those balls were starting to fall.
'Fakhet!' he said. 'You were a radio operator in Afghanistan.' He and two others had been picked for this operation because of their technical experience, so that they could man the ship's radio room.
'Yes, Amir.'
'You know what shortwave sets look like. What the antennae look like.'
'Yes, Amir!'
'Take Obeidat up to the ship's mast. Use the ladder and deck hatch behind the radio shack. See if you can find the shortwave antenna and cut it or pull it down.'
'It will be done, Amir!'
This particular rat wouldn't be able to reveal too much to the world outside that hadn't already been guessed, but it was time to move to the next phase. In any combat, a critical aspect of battle management was the pacing, the ability to keep moving and to always stay one step ahead of one's opponent.
Khalid returned his attention to the ship's schematic. According to the data carried by the small moving red dots, both Ghailiani and Rawasdeh were traveling with Mitchell and Carroll. The four of them emerged from the stairwell onto Deck Six, now.
The most likely reason for this was that Ghailiani and Rawasdeh were dead, and the two SOCA agents had taken their ID cards with them. Like Khalid himself, Rawasdeh was a veteran of both Afghanistan and Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, the branch of al-Qaeda fighting in Iraq. He would never surrender, never betray the Cause.
Ghailiani, however, was an unknown quantity. The Ship's Security officer had been kept in line so far by threatening his wife and child — the operatives holding them e-mailed a new photograph to his account each day, proving his wife and daughter were still alive but still very much at their captors' mercy. But it was possible that Ghailiani had broken completely; for several days, now, the Moroccan had been showing the enormous stress he'd been working under, the staggering load of fear. Had he been pushed too hard? Had he elected to help the two British agents?
If the SOCA agents had managed to kill Rawasdeh and Ghailiani, they had Rawasdeh's assault rifle, and they probably had handguns of their own.
'How many men do we have guarding prisoners in the theater?' Khalid asked.
'Six, Amir Yusef,' Haqqani replied. 'Four inside, two at the doors outside.'
'Alert the two at the doors. Send them up to Deck Six to kill those two.'
'Yes, Amir.'
'They are to use caution. The targets are armed. They are not to attempt to capture them. Just kill them as quickly and as efficiently as possible. I don't want to lose any more men.'
'It will be done, Amir!' 'It had better be!'
'Nice place you got here,' Mitchell said as they stepped inside Howorth's stateroom. 'I didn't get an ocean view.'
'Maybe you don't know the right people,' Howorth replied.
'Maybe. Who are your people, anyway?'
'Let's go into that later,' she told him. She tossed her ID card and Ghailiani's onto the bedside table. 'Watch the door, will you? If they're tracking us by these ID cards, they may be on their way here already.' All business, Howorth walked to the desk set into one corner of the compartment, next to the sliding glass doors opening onto an enclosed balcony.
'Yeah. And they know our staterooms, too. Why the hell do we need to come here? We need to find a place to lay low.'
She was already booting up her laptop. 'Because my computer is here,' she told him. 'And it has its own satellite link, so we don't need to go through the ship's communications suite.'
'And that right there rules out MI5 or SOCA,' Mitchell said. 'So… MI6? CIA?'
'Something like that.' She glanced at Ghailiani, who was sitting on the bed now with a dazed and vacant look on his face. 'Let's leave it there, shall we?'
Mitchell read her glance and nodded. It wouldn't do to discuss things like that in front of someone who was still, technically, a terrorist, or one of the terrorists' accomplices. He looked over the AK-47, then leaned against the door. Howorth typed in the first of her passwords… and then the second. After a moment, the front page for GCHQ's secure Internet connection came up. She typed in the final password and her user name, then began typing rapidly.
'Maybe we should pack that up and take it somewhere else,' Mitchell suggested. 'Damn it, they're going to be here any minute!'
'Not much longer,' Howorth told him. 'Just let me — '
There was a thump at the door, and Mitchell turned, startled as it opened slightly, hitting his shoulder. 'Shit!'
Howorth glanced over her shoulder and saw him throw himself against the door, banging it shut. She kept typing
Automatic gunfire thundered in the passageway outside. Bullet holes appeared in the door, sending splinters whirling into the stateroom as Mitchell's body was smashed back a step in a spray of blood. The thunder continued, more and more holes appearing now on the inside of the door as Mitchell collapsed on the deck. Bullets slashing through the stateroom hit the balcony windows, smashing them in shattering glass. Ghailiani was hit as well, knocked back onto the bed as a booted foot smashed the wreckage of the door open.
Howorth had an instant to react. Mitchell's AK was too far, the P226 clumsily inaccessible tucked into the waistband of her jeans. Snatching up the computer, she leaped from the chair and whirled around toward the sliding door.
'Wakkif!' one of the gunmen yelled as he barged into the room, the stock of an AK-47 up against his shoulder. But Howorth was through the shattered glass door and onto the narrow balcony. The man behind her opened fire, and bullets smashed more glass and screamed off the balcony railing.
She hit the railing and hurled the computer out into the emptiness beyond. While it was unlikely that the terrorists would be able to break her laptop's security, there was no sense in handing them the computer's hard drive and the data stored there as a present. Grabbing the railing with both hands, she vaulted over, twisting to face the ship's hull as she slammed against it.
For a dizzying instant Howorth dangled a hundred feet above the ocean and the surging white wake of the ship below. The Atlantis Queen's white superstructure had a slight tumblehome, and her feet and ankles, she could feel, were hanging over empty space — the opening of the next ocean-view balcony below hers. She let go.
Sliding down the tumblehome, she fell into the opening of that next balcony down, snatching at the next railing, nearly losing her grip as the shock wracked her body with pain and concussion. Somehow, though, she
