Aurora could accelerate to mach 6 and reach altitudes of sixty miles or more, qualifying the handful of Air Force pilots flying them for astronauts' wings. This aircraft had left Groom Lake — the fabled Area 51 in southern Nevada — in the wee hours of Sunday morning, arriving at its operational airfield in Machrihanish, Strathclyde, on the tip of the Kintyre Penninsula in Scotland, just over an hour later.
From there, it had deployed out over the ocean to the targeted operational area for the past three days, tracking the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper closely. From its perch almost forty miles up, the dead-black, triangular aircraft remained invisible and unheard; its array of sophisticated cameras, imaging radars, and other senses gave observers at the NRO, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA unprecedented resolution, better even than the best views afforded by the Argus series or other spy satellites.
On the big wall display, the view had zoomed in on the flat, open deck between the Atlantis Queen's bridge house and Deck Twelve Terrace, and the open passageways leading aft on either side of the smokestack. There was a light cloud cover between the spy plane and the ship, so the view was illuminated in greens and gray tones, a computer-synthesized blending of radar, IR, and UV imaging.
When the terrorists pulled back the tarpaulin, the Stinger missile launchers in their opened crates had been easily identifiable. So were the BCU units on the deck, bleeding cold argon gas under IR wavelengths in thin, black clouds. Three of the terrorists, seen from almost directly overhead, ran aft past the smokestack.
Voices called back and forth from the Art Room's overhead speakers.
'This is Amethyst Three! Target lock!'
'Amethyst Three, Talisman One! Take your shot!'
'Three, firing!'
'Pull back,' Rubens said. 'Let's see the helicopters.'
The view zoomed out, the two hijacked ships dwindling to side-by-side mismatched green rectangles against a black sea. Two helicopters were turning away to the north, one trailing hot smoke, while a spreading patch of white-on-black marked the crash site of Amethyst Two. Amethyst Three was dead astern of the two ships. They watched in silence from the Art Room as a wire-guided missile streaked away from Amethyst Three toward the stern of the Sandpiper, as, an instant later, the contrails of two Stinger missiles drew white lines out from the Adantis Queen's superstructure toward the British helicopter gunship.
The TOW missile struck, the explosion of white fog from the back of the freighter's deckhouse silent and sudden. Before the Super Lynx gunship could turn away, one of the Stingers struck it, the second missing and falling into the sea.
'Amethyst Three, I'm hit! I'm hit!'
'Amethyst Three, Talisman One. Break off! Break off!'
'This is Amethyst Two! I'm losing power! Mayday! Mayday!'
A second helicopter plowed into the ocean, a gentler impact than the first as the pilot tried for a controlled touchdown.
'Talisman Two, Talisman One! Get in there and see if you can help Amethyst Two! All units, break off the attack. Repeat, break off! Break off!'
'Damn!' Rockman said.
'They had no choice,' Rubens said.
'But they got the number three gun on the Sandpiper,' Sharon Tollerton said from the next console over. 'They could still go in with the Merlins!'
'Not with the hijackers fully alert and waiting for them with automatic weapons,' Rubens said. 'The commandos would be cut to pieces before they could fast-rope to the deck. We'll need to try something else.'
Unfortunately, Rubens thought, the British debacle might have just slammed the door shut for Black Cat.
Carolyn Howorth slipped into the casino, glancing left and right for any signs of terrorist gunmen before moving into the crowd. There were fifty or sixty people in the room, she estimated, most of them staring out through the broad glass windows overlooking the ship's fantail. The room was dead quiet, the tension palpable.
Outside, she saw helicopters in the distance, black specks against the glare of the westering sun.
Howorth had been in her hideaway — a rather traditional place for stowaways, she thought, the interior of one of the Atlantis Queen's lifeboats — when she'd heard the whoosh of rockets and peeked out in time to see a British helicopter shot down into the sea. She decided then that she needed to get inside and mingle with the passengers. It had been just twenty-four hours since she'd escaped from her stateroom over the balcony railing as armed terrorists had burst into the compartment, gunning down Thomas Mitchell and Ghailiani. The man who'd opened his stateroom's balcony door had let her into Cabin 5087, which was directly beneath hers.
The man — he introduced himself as Adrian Bollinger and the much younger woman with him as Tabitha Sandberg — had bombarded her with questions, most of them about how she'd managed to get to his private balcony outside, but she'd stopped him by the simple expedient of placing her palm across his mouth. He'd spluttered, then gone silent when she told him terrorists had taken the ship and that now they were hunting her.
'We wondered,' the Sandberg woman had said. 'All those men with guns…'
'They're going to be coming down here in just a second,' she told them. 'You never saw me, okay? They'll think I fell into the sea.'
'But where are you going?' Bollinger had asked. 'You can't just — '
'I can and I will,' she'd said, opening the cabin door and checking both ways outside. 'Remember! You haven't seen anyonel'
Bollinger turned and locked the glass sliding door. 'We haven't seen a soul.'
Howorth had made her way to a service stairway, then, and gone down one more deck: Most of the staterooms on Deck Four didn't have balconies like the one she'd scrambled onto on Deck Five, because that space was taken up by long lines of lifeboats slung from davits.
A door opened onto the Deck Four starboard promenade, which gave her access to the lifeboats. She'd been hiding in Number 5 ever since, eating emergency rations and making herself comfortable on a jury-rigged mattress of life jackets and blankets. She needed time to think, and consider her next move.
Howorth had to assume that Mitchell and Ghailiani both were dead… though she wasn't sure about the Moroccan crewman. She'd seen him drop to the deck when the gunmen broke in, but she hadn't seen bullets ripping him open like they had Mitchell, who'd caught a full burst through the splintering door. It might, she thought, be a good idea to assume Ghailiani was not dead but in terrorist hands. Did he know anything about her that might help the enemy? Other than the fact of the two of them, her and Mitchell, Ghailiani didn't know much at all.
Her ID card had been on the bedside table in her cabin. The terrorists would have it now. With luck, they'd checked out Bollinger's cabin and assumed she'd fallen into the ocean. The only way they could spot her now was if she wandered into a restricted area of the ship, one with sensors that would pick up her movement and body heat. If she stayed in those parts of the ship open to passengers, she thought, she ought to be okay.
Her computer was gone, hurled into the sea to keep the terrorists from getting it. She was out of touch with her headquarters. Briefly she'd considered going down to Connexions in the Deck One mall and using one of those computers to contact GCHQ, but she'd swiftly dropped that idea. She'd seen them capture one man there — Mitchell's partner — and if those computers were still online, the terrorists up in the computer center would be watching them for activity.
By transmitting the little she and Mitchell had been able to discover so far before the gunmen had burst in on them, she'd probably done all she could. The trouble was, Carolyn Howorth wanted to do more, and she couldn't do it while hiding in a damned lifeboat.
Then the helicopters had flown up the Queen's starboard side, missiles had lashed out from one of the upper decks and slapped one of the aircraft into the sea, and she'd heard a thunderous boom from the other side of the ship. Quickly she'd scrambled out of the lifeboat and found service stairs going up. She reached Deck Nine and headed aft, entering the Pyramid Club Casino. Alone, she would invite suspicion, or simply harassment by any terrorists who might see her. In a group, she could blend in. Each time she'd been there, there'd been passengers in the Pyramid Club, sometimes lots of them.
Attendance in the casino was way down this afternoon, but there were people. None were playing at any of
