doing.. have you ever heard of a drive-by download?'
His brow furrowed above the heavy black frame of his glasses. 'Uh, no. I don't think I have.'
'I'm hoping the tangos on the bridge haven't, either,' she said. 'And if they don't know we're transmitting down here in the first place, the surprise will be that much sweeter… '
'Leon Klinghoffer,' Debra Collins said. 'Who is that?' Donna Bing asked. 'A passenger on the cruise ship Achille Lauro' Rubens told them. 'An old man in a wheelchair, murdered by the terrorists when they took over the ship in 1985. They shot him in the head and in the chest, then forced a couple of the ship's crew to throw the body and the wheelchair overboard.'
'The news media is playing up that angle,' Collins added. 'Bernstein was Jewish, like Klinghoffer.'
'Is that why they killed him?' Bing wanted to know. She sounded horrified. 'Because he was Jewish!'
'Of course,' Gene Carter, one of the regular NSC members, said. 'Terrorists have sequestered Jewish hostages before, and threatened to kill them first. Entebbe is a case in point.'
'It's possible, I suppose,' Rubens said. 'Mostly, though, I think Khalid just wanted to send a message to show he was serious. Bernstein might have just been a convenient, random target. It is true, though, that the terrorists appear to have access to Ship's Security records on the passengers. They might have identified Bernstein from those.'
'The.. public aspect of this crisis is getting out of hand,' Wehrum pointed out. 'FOX has trotted out the Achille Lauro affair, pointing out the similarities with the Atlantis Queen, and is doing these damned man-on-the-street interviews with people saying we have to go in and kick Khalid's ass.' He glanced at Bing, who gave him a sharp look. 'Sorry.'
'It's true,' Thomas Elton said. He was a small, prissy man, the NSC's liaison with the State Department. 'The other networks are starting to take it up as well. With this… this cold-blooded murder airing on every news channel over and over, people are wondering why we're not doing something about the situation.'
'They're starting to look at Reagan and his response to the Achille Lauro hijacking,' Wehrum said. 'They want the President to do something.'
'Maybe he should,' Rubens said.
'The Achille Lauro hijacking,' Bing said carefully, 'was resolved without bloodshed. Without more bloodshed, I should say. We didn't go in all guns blazing. The Egyptians negotiated with the terrorists, and they went ashore peacefully. Reagan's response was to force the suspects' plane down in Sicily, and precipitate an international incident.'
'With respect,' Rubens said, 'the Atlantis Queen crisis really has very few similarities to the Achille Lauro. None at all, actually, except that both hijackings involved cruise ships.
'In fact, the PLF terrorists who took over the Achille Lauro weren't intending to hijack the ship at all. There were only four terrorists on board — some sources suggest there were two others who stayed in the background — and they apparently were using the ship as a staging platform for launching a raid on Israel from the sea. A ship's steward spotted their cache of weapons and explosives, though, they panicked, and they took over the ship. They threatened to blow the ship up unless fifty Palestinians being held in Israel were released, but everyone involved knew that wasn't going to happen. When Syria. Refused to let the ship dock at Tartus, they were stuck. A classic example of a full-blown clusterfuck.'
'Mr. Rubens, please,' Bing said.
He shrugged. 'The Egyptians did negotiate, or they pretended to, and the terrorists went free at Port Said, supposedly before anyone ashore knew about Klinghoffer's murder. They, and the mastermind of the operation, Abu Abbas, got on a seven-thirty-seven headed for Libya. At Reagan's orders, the plane was intercepted by F-fourteens and forced to land in Sicily.
'This situation is different on almost every level. This time, the terrorists clearly targeted both the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper from the start. The operation was large — Carrousel estimates at least twenty hijackers on board the Queen, and a similar but unknown number on the Sandpiper It was well armed, their weapons including a number of Stinger shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles and, we're guessing, several tons at least of high explosives smuggled onto the ship at Southampton. It was well equipped, including a helicopter. And it was superbly planned. The op included the suborning of at least one of the security officers on board the Queen, the murder and replacement of two Japanese nationals on board the Sandpiper, and the replacement or the suborning of at least one of the crewmen on board the Ishikari.'
'How do you know that last?' Wehrum asked.
'Because of the timing. The destruction of the Ishikari was deliberate, timed to allow a helicopter full of terrorists to touch down on the Sandpiper and take her over just before the Queen arrived in the area. The tangos have been carrying out this plan of theirs step by step by meticulous step… and they've been staying one step ahead of us the whole way.'
'So what are you suggesting, Mr. Rubens?' Bing asked him.
'First, that we not allow the perceived similarities of this situation with the Achille Lauro hijacking to deter us,' he said. 'Second, that we pay attention to something important — the fact that, whatever Khalid claims, the tangos aren't simply holding the crew and passengers of the Queen for ransom. They didn't need to take over the Pacific Sandpiper for that. So we can assume they have something bigger in mind. Something flashier.'
'New York City,' General Barton said. 'A huge dirty bomb in New York Harbor.'
'That seems the likeliest possibility right now,' Collins said. 'The IJI Brigade is almost certainly aligned with al-Qaeda, and might be an operational branch of it. Al-Qaeda always goes for big, spectacular operations with high body counts. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing… which was supposed to bring down both towers and release a cloud of poison gas, though that part isn't generally well known. Operation Bojinka, which was discovered and stopped before it could be carried out — the simultaneous hijacking and destruction of ten or twelve commercial aircraft over the Pacific Ocean. The attack on the USS Cole off Yemen. The embassy bombings in East Africa. The nine-eleven attacks. Typical al-Qaeda operations don't have religious overtones, and they don't demand ransom money or the release of hostages. They're designed to punish the West for supporting Israel or for acting as 'oppressors,' And they're designed to grab world attention and hold it.'
'Maybe this is a first time for ransom demands,' Bing suggested. 'Al-Qaeda might need money. We've been putting the squeeze on them by seizing their assets every time we can identify them.'
'Or it might not be al-Qaeda after all,' Wehrum added.
'Or the demand for two billion dollars and the release of Muslim prisoners might be nothing but a smokescreen,' Rubens said, 'a means of spinning things out, to let the hijacked ships get close enough to a U. S. city to do some serious damage.'
Bing considered this. 'The President is still… reluctant to authorize military action against the hijackers,' she said. 'But he also says that the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper must not be allowed to enter American waters. To prevent that, he will authorize deadly force against both ships.'
'My God,' Barton said. 'Are you saying what I think you're — '
'A Los Angeles-class submarine is shadowing those two hijacked vessels,' Bing said. 'The Newport News, part of the Eisenhower's strike group. If necessary, she will be given orders to destroy both ships.'
'There must be another way,' Admiral Prendergast said. 'We can't kill over three thousand civilians!'
'If they've breached those MOX containers,' Elton added, 'it could also mean an unprecedented ecological disaster. All of that radioactive debris adrift in the Gulf Stream? It could poison the North Atlantic… contaminate the entire Atlantic coast of Europe, at the very least.'
'All of which the terrorists are probably counting on,' Rubens pointed out. 'My guess, ladies and gentlemen, is that that's exactly what Khalid and his people intend… to force us to destroy those ships ourselves in order to protect our cities. Remember the nine-eleven conspiracy nonsense?'
They did. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, conspiracy theories had begun floating about on the Internet to the effect that Flight 93 had been shot down by U. S. military aircraft, that the WTC attacks had been staged by the U. S. government, even that what had crashed into the Pentagon hadn't been a hijacked airliner at all but a missile launched by an American combat plane. The possible motives for such a conspiracy were fuzzy, of course, but generally had to do with creating an excuse to invade the Middle East in order to secure and control the sources of Arab oil.
