So predictable, he thought.
Khalid and the Operation Zarqawi planning staff had expected something of the sort, of course. The Americans and their British lapdogs weren't about to let the Pacific Sandpiper's cargo go without at least a show of force.
He held a microphone in one hand. 'Barakat! Are you ready?'
'We are ready, Amir! We have target lock.'
'Hold steady. Track them, but do not fire!'
'Yes, Amir!'
'Shawi! Are your people set?'
'Yes, Amir! The gun ports are all open, as you commanded. We're tracking them with the stern gun!'
'Do not fire until I give the order.'
'As you command, Amir!'
'Let me see Camera Ninety-five,' he told Hamud Haqqani, seated at the monitor immediately in front of him. That camera was located on the terrace overlooking the pool and sundeck on Deck Eleven, between the bridge superstructure and the ship's smoke stack. The camera angle could be controlled by Haqqani from Security and was looking now out across blue water as three of the four lead helicopters flew past. The fourth was centered on the view from the fantail, steadily moving closer.
'Amir! This is Fakhet, in the radio room!' a voice called over the intercom. 'They are transmitting. They say they want to check on the condition of the passengers and the crews of both ships! They say this is not an attack, and that they are willing to negotiate!'
'Ignore them,' Khalid snapped.
The enemy would be using the transmission as a ploy, hoping to get as close as possible. Those four leaders were gunships; he could see the TOW missile launchers slung from outrigger pylons to either side of each helicopter.
The three lead attack helicopters were visible in full broadside now, passing the Queen's starboard side where the Sandpiper's guns couldn't reach them.
He keyed his microphone. 'All stations… fire! Fire nowl'
'Fire now!' Khalid's voice called over the radio in Ahmad Khaled Barakat's earphone.
He raised his hand, then snapped it down. 'Fire/' The five men with him on the Grotto deck stood along the starboard rail, each balancing a one-and-a-half-meter-long tube over his shoulder. Three of the men fired their weapons, the back-blasts spitting bursts of white smoke across the suddenly churning waters of the pool. Three missiles leaped from the launch tubes, kicked out by small ejection motors that carried them a safe distance from the shooters before the main, solid-fuel rockets fired. They dropped a few feet before the main engines engaged, giving them an odd, swooping look as they streaked out and up toward their targets, the motors white-hot on the leading tips of their gently curving contrails.
The weapons were American-made FIM-92 Stinger shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles, a type well known to the mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan during their war against the invading Soviets. All six of the men standing behind the railing were veterans of that war. Barakat himself had stood on an icy, wind-blasted precipice north of Kabul and brought down a Russian Mi-8 helicopter with one, over twenty years earlier, and he'd trained all five of the others in their use at various camps across the border in Pakistan.
Ironically enough, it had been the American CIA that had provided these missiles, a means of striking at the Soviets through their mujahideen proxies in Afghanistan over twenty years earlier. The Americans had supplied as many as two thousand Stinger launchers to mujahideen camps in Pakistan and taught Barakat and others how to use them. Later, when the hated Soviets had at last been sent scurrying north beyond the Kotal-e Salang, the money-crazed Americans had actually tried to buy back the unused launchers.
As if Allah's holy fighters would ever surrender such magnificent weapons!
Three targets, three missiles. The other two men stood ready, launchers balanced on their shoulders, waiting to see if the first three would find their targets or if they would need to fire more. The missiles streaked low across the water, their infrared homing sensors drawing them relentlessly toward the hot engine exhaust ports on either side of each Super Lynx's engine.
The first Stinger struck the lead helicopter squarely in the engine just below the main rotor, the three kilograms of high explosives in the warhead detonating with a sharp flash ^nd a spray of fragments. The aircraft staggered in mid-air, rolling to the right as its main rotor began to come apart, then plunging nose first into the sea with a vast white splash.
The other two helicopters had started to shear off toward the north, but a second Stinger missile found one of those and exploded against its fuselage as well. Smoke boiled from a hole in the aircraft's side. The third Super Lynx released a string of flares like dazzling stars as it turned away, struggling to gain altitude. The last Stinger started to follow it up, then veered off, tracking a flare instead.
'New weapons!' Barakat yelled, pointing. 'Now! And you two! Go aft! Quickly! Quickly!'
Arif and Nejmuddin, the two men who'd not yet fired, hurried toward the right, running past the white loom of the cruise ship's smokestack. The other three dropped their empty launchers and snatched up three more. A pile of cases had been laid out in a neat row beside the swimming pool, opened and ready, all of them covered by a large tarpaulin to keep the weapons hidden from the prying eyes of American satellites.
They would reload the empty tubes later. Right now, it was faster to grab new launchers. Several BCUs, or Battery Coolant Units, rested on the deck nearby. Each man plugged a tube from the BCU into the hand guard of his new weapon, charging it with argon gas and preparing it to fire.
Over the years, many of the weapons had become useless. Those battery packs needed careful maintenance to keep them charged; the argon gas canisters sometimes leaked. But enough had been kept in working order, or been refurbished by parts brought from other sources. There were even American weapons dealers willing to break their own laws and sell fresh battery packs to Saudi buyers, for enough money.
What was it Lenin had said about selling Capitalists the rope with which they would be hanged?
Astern, there was a flash, and a missile came streaking in low above the ships' wakes. The fourth helicopter had just fired a missile, which was arrowing straight toward the stern of the Pacific Sandpiper. At almost the same instant, Nejmuddin fired his Stinger at the hovering aircraft. Arif fired his weapon an instant later.
The trick here was to make the helicopter pilot veer off before the wire-guided missile struck its target, a deadly game of chicken. The British pilot held his figurative ground, however, dropping a string of bright-burning flares and holding his position until the TOW missile slammed into the open gun port above the Sandpiper's fantail and detonated with a savage blast. Only then did he swing his aircraft's nose to the right, beginning a hard turn away from the battle, but before he'd completed the turn the first Stinger streaked into the fuselage just behind the cockpit and exploded.
Barakat raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes, studying the retreating Super Lynx. The first round of the battle had certainly gone to the jihadist fighters, but only one aircraft had been shot down, and though two of the others were damaged, they were still in the air, and all three were still armed and deadly. There were also four more helicopters in the air, the troop transports, still a couple of miles out.
The battle wasn't over yet.
'It's not over yet,' Jeff Rockman said, his eyes on the big screen, along with those of every other man and woman in the Deep Black ops room. Amethyst Two had just gone down into the sea.
'Yes, it is,' Rubens replied softly. 'They've lost the element of surprise.'
On the enormous monitor filling much of the wall in front of the Art Room consoles and workstations, the battle unfolded in eerie, green-lit silence. The images this time were coming not from a U. S. spy satellite but from an aircraft currently orbiting nearly two hundred thousand feet above the North Atlantic, on the very edge of space.
Once, that aircraft had been known by the code name Aurora, and some insiders continued to refer to it as such. The actual name had been changed in 1985, when a military censor had missed the mention of 'Aurora' in a Pentagon budget request to Congress, and the very existence of such an aircraft remained one of the U. S. government's most closely guarded secrets. With pulser ramjet engines fueled by liquid methane, the hypersonic
