'Amir!' Jamel Hijazi shouted from the radar display. 'They're coming!'
Khalid walked over to the display, which was set now to show everything around the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper out to a radius of 120 nautical miles. The display used computers to integrate the data from several radars mounted on the mast above and behind the bridge in order to show both surface and air targets. Two surface targets had been dogging their wake for two days, now, very slowly closing to a range of less than fifty miles. Their IFF codes had been changed so that the Queen's computers couldn't identify them, but Khalid suspected they were a pair of British destroyers or frigates. Military aircraft were circling a hundred miles out.
But something new had appeared on the display… a tiny double chevron of bright green dots, four in front, four close behind, coming straight toward the Queen and the Sandpiper at 150 knots. Helicopters.
'Tell Ibrahim to stand ready,' Khalid said, 'and to wait for my signal.'
As Hijazi picked up the intercom handset and began speaking rapidly into it, Khalid watched the approaching targets, nodding. It begins…
Chapter 21
'Five more minutes, General! Amethyst is peeling off now!' The helicopter pilot had to use his radio headset to call the information back and be heard above the roar of the rotors. The AW101 Merlin, its cargo deck crowded with battle-ready SAS troopers, screamed along less than a hundred feet above the water, and the thunder filled General Saunders' claustrophobic world.
'Right!' Saunders called back. He looked at the men with him, black-clad, faces masked by balaclavas and gas masks, torsos swaddled in Kevlar and combat vests and equipment. It gave them an otherworldly look, alien invaders bent on destruction.
It was an image deliberately fostered by the Special Air Service, an appearance not only practical in combat but also designed to terrorize hostage takers for the mind-numbing instant of confrontation, an instant these men were trained to utilize with deadly speed and precision.
His critics, Saunders knew, would attack him for his presence here, but Alexander Saunders was not the sort of man who would send his boys in while he remained behind, safe and secure in the rear. He'd been a colonel in the SAS before his promotion to brigadier and, later, his appointment to the DSF. It was important that he be here, to make a statement, to prove that Britain still had the resolve to go toe-to-toe with evil and to win.
Saunders let his mind move through the ops plan once more, looking for anything that might have been missed, any preparations or final orders that needed to be made. There was nothing. They were ready. They were go, as their American cousins might have said.
The assault code-named Harrow Storm was deploying as two waves. Amethyst was first, four HMA.8 Super Lynx attack helicopters on loan from the Three Commando Brigade Air Squadron at Yeovilton. They'd been outfitted as gunships, each mounting two 20mm cannons and eight TOW antitank missiles. Coming up on the Pacific Sandpiper and the Adantis Queen from astern, they were swinging off to the north now to begin their attack.
One, Amethyst Three, would go straight in, firing a wire-guided missile at the chain gun mount on the Sandpiper's stern. The other three would swing around past the Queen's starboard side, using the cruise ship as a shield in order to loop past the vessels' bows and come down on the Sandpiper's bridge house from forward. Amethyst One and Two would take out the Queen's forward starboard and port chain gun mounts respectively, while Amethyst Four provided cover and backup, using its cannons to disable the terrorists' helicopter and to clear the freighter's deck and superstructure. With the chain guns out of commission, the attack helicopters would then circle both ships, using their cannons against targets of opportunity, and in particular firing into the bridge windows in order to kill the terrorist leaders. Another prime target was the A Deck cargo hold doors, which satellite surveillance imagery showed to be open at the moment, with a gangway connecting them with the Sandpiper's deck. If those doors were closed, Amethyst Four would open them with a wire-guided missile.
Sixty seconds precisely after the coordinated attack began, Talisman Flight would reach the combat area, each carrying twenty battle-tested SAS commandos. Talisman Two's stick would fast-rope onto the Sandpiper's superstructure above the bridge, then move to secure the bridge and communications center. Talisman Three would do the same with the Queen's bridge, while Talisman Four lowered its stick onto the Sandpiper's deck immediately adjacent to the gangway leading to the cruise ship's hold. Their responsibility would be to get onto the cruise ship and disable any explosives that might have been rigged around the transferred radioactive canisters.
Talisman One would be in reserve, sending its commandos wherever they were needed, but with special attention paid to the Sandpiper's cargo holds forward. The op planners had felt that it was unlikely that the terrorists had planted explosives around the large one-hundred-ton canisters on the Sandpiper, because even an explosion large enough to blast the ship to bits would be unlikely to breach them. Intel from the NSA operator on board the cruise ship suggested that any explosives were there, in the Queen's aft hold.
The plan, code-named Harrow Storm, depended on speed, surprise, and overwhelming firepower for success. If anyone on either ship had a button ready to push to detonate those explosives, it would be in the hands of Khalid himself, rather than risking premature martyrdom with a poorly trained AQ soldier. And the psych wonks had done a thorough workup on the man calling himself Yusef Khalid. He was into a power trip, they said, and would not surrender the responsibility for blowing up those ships to an underling.
He would also, they insisted, hesitate before committing suicide and ending the mission. With the ships, the hostages, and two and a half tons of plutonium, he held what he believed to be the winning hand… which, oddly enough, meant he would wait before playing it. The man, according to all intelligence reports on him, wasn't religious; he would want more than martyrdom at sea. If the psych profiles were accurate, he wanted to sail those two hijacked ships into New York Harbor or Boston Harbor and hold them for ransom.
So the op planners estimated that there was only a 20 percent chance that Khalid would push the button before the SAS could kill him and secure the explosives.
An 80 percent chance of success was pretty good in Saunders' estimation, better than you usually got in this business.
Less certain was the fate of the hostages on board. Some were bound to be hit when those wire-guided missiles started detonating, especially on the Sandpiper. Captains and senior officers might well still be on the bridges of the two vessels, and they would almost certainly be killed if they were. And the SAS assault teams would be first moving to secure the radioactive canisters and any explosives planted around them and worry about hostage rescue later. A lot of civilians might die. Any crew members still in the engineering sections deep in the bowels of both ships might be killed as well.
But what was certain was that all of them would die if Khalid blew up the ships and blanketed the area with a cloud of radioactive fallout, especially if his ultimate goal was to set off his bombs in Boston or New York City. The SAS troopers would save as many of the civilians as they could, but their first responsibility, spelled out most carefully in their orders, was dealing with the terrorist bomb threat, followed closely by ensuring the safety of the MOX canisters on both ships.
'Amethyst is beginning the attack run!' the helicopter pilot called to him.
'Right.' He made a fist of his gloved hand and punched the air. 'Showtime, people! Let's kill some tangos!'
The troops cheered as the Merlin transport accelerated, engines howling.
'Amir!' Ahmad Khaled Barakat's voice sounded calm over the intercom channel. 'They are beginning an attack run.'
'Wait,' Khalid replied. 'Wait! No one is to fire without my direct order!'
He was in the Ship's Security Office, watching the approaching helicopters on a monitor displaying the feed from a camera mounted on the ship's Deck Nine fantail, looking aft across the swimming pool there. Three of the four helicopters in the lead were angling off to the left, toward the starboard side of the Atlantis Queen. The remaining lead aircraft, plus the other four, larger and heavier aircraft, continued to approach from astern.
