'Wakkif!' a harsh voice barked from farther aft… and then three flashlights switched on, pinning the party of passengers against the railing. 'Stop! Stop where you are!'
'Aw, shit!' Carmichael said. Turning, he started to run forward, but a hijacker with an AK-47 stepped out of the shadows and knocked Carmichael down with a rifle butt to the jaw.
Stunned, the civilians could only stand there, helpless as a half-dozen armed men came toward them both from forward and from aft. A few of the civilians raised their hands.
'Put hands down,' one of the hijackers said in heavily accented English. 'We know you no have weapons. Now move! That way! You will come with us!'
And the hijackers herded the twelve of them forward along the deck, back toward the door from which they'd just emerged.
They fell to twenty thousand feet before releasing their chutes. With a shock, Dean's parachute opened above him, rapidly slowing his terminal velocity from free fall to a gentle drift through the night.
Grabbing his left and right steering toggles, Dean brought his parafoil into a gentle left turn. His parachute was an MC-4 ram-air military chute, two night-black rectangular canopy sections joined by seven air cells to create a double wing, one just aboye the other. Ram-air chutes had astonishing glide and control characteristics that allowed the parachutist to steer them with extraordinary precision. The red arrow on his forearm display was showing the direction toward the Atlantis Queen and the range… now about four and a half miles.
He could see the other jumpers ahead of him in a ragged and uneven curve, the bright wink of their IR strobes showing their positions in the sky as they slowly began adjusting their positions relative to one another. Vic Walters and David P. Yancey had point and would be going in together; the rest were spacing themselves out so that they would come in one at a time, about five to ten seconds apart.
Dean would come in last.
His rate of descent was steady at fifteen feet per second, his speed twenty-five knots. The wind was light — about five knots from the southwest. The sky had been clear earlier, when they'd left the Eisenhower, but was becoming overcast again swiftly.
With the Queen steaming away from him at twenty knots, it was going to take him some time to catch up with her.
Rubens stood in the Art Room, looking up at the big screen. Deck plans provided by Royal Sky Line had been turned into computer-graphic schematics showing every deck on board the ship, Decks One through Twelve above, Decks A through D below. The sheer size and complexity of the target meant that Neptune was going to have to be carried out in sections. Cougar was only the first wave. Jaguar was in reserve, the Ohio was closing with the Pacific Sandpiper, and the, SAS had just reported that they were ready to go with Operation Harrow Lightning.
But the critical part was getting those first few men down safely onto the Atlantis Queen's deck.
He listened to the chatter from the string of parachutists. There wasn't much. The team had drilled endlessly and didn't need to say much as they lined themselves up for the approach to their target.
'Cougar Two,' a voice said, identifying itself. 'Slowing descent. Winds picking up a bit. Eight knots.'
'Copy.'
So far, everything was going perfectly by the book. Rubens was already composing his resignation letter in his head, however. By ordering Neptune to go in without authorization from the President or the Pentagon, he was committing a decidedly illegal act, dropping a dozen armed men onto the deck of a cruise ship belonging to another nation and running the risk that his actions would precipitate disaster. If Khalid decided to blow up either ship out there, radioactive fallout would easily stretch along the prevailing winds three hundred miles across southern Newfoundland, while seaborne contamination might wash across beaches from Newfoundland to Ireland and possibly the rest of western Europe as well. It would be an unprecedented ecological and radiological calamity. That he'd given the order while the U. S. government was supposedly carrying out negotiations with the hijackers, or trying to, would only cast his decision into a sharper, harsher light.
But the alternative was to let the Queen keep coming, with the New England coast now less than six hundred miles away.
It was an alternative that simply didn't bear consideration.
'How about it, Kathy?' he asked the woman seated at a computer console nearby. Kathy Caravaggio was one of his best handlers. 'Ready to raise the stakes?'
'We have full admin control,', she told him. 'They don't know it yet, but we have control of their security systems now.'
'Do it,' Rubens said.
'What is wrong with it?' Khalid demanded.
'Amir… I don't know. The security system appears to be running normally, but all of the security cameras have just switched off!'
'That's impossible, unless you shut it down here!'
'I did not, Amir! I swear!'
'Let me see the deck displays.'
Hamud Haqqani touched a switch, frowned, then hit it again. 'Sir… we don't have those screens, either.'
Khalid felt a cold twist in his gut. The deck display screens should have been able to show him points of light for every person on board the ship — red for passengers with ID, blue for people sensed in various areas of the ship without ID, green for the hijackers and the members of the crew. If he couldn't see where the hostages were, he was losing control.
'There was a large group of hostages in the casino, yes?'
'Yes, Amir,' Haqqani said. 'Last time I looked, there were around fifty passengers and a few crew members there.. Tahir and Faruk are on the deck outside there, and El Hakim is inside the casino.'
'Are there other large gatherings of passengers?'
'No, sir. A few in the Kleito Bar… four or five, perhaps. Most passengers are in their staterooms, except for the ones in the theater.'
'We may be facing an attack,' Khalid said. 'Get those screens working!'
They were picking up speed. The maximum forward velocity of a standard ram-air chute is about 25 miles per hour. The team's MC-4s had been modified, however, to improve their speed in horizontal flight. They could manage about 34 miles per hour, now, which meant they were closing on the Atlantis Queen at about 14 miles per hour… or roughly twelve knots. Four and a half regular miles was a little under four nautical miles. Four nautical miles at twelve knots — twenty minutes.
Which meant they were getting damned close by now.
Guided by the GPS-controlled readouts on their wrists, the strike force steadily closed on their target, now less than half a mile ahead. The Queen was running with her lights on and so made a splendid visual target.
'Okay, Cougars One and Two,' Dean said over the squad channel. The men were identified by their order in the stick. 'You've got the call.'
'Cougar One. I see the Atlas Deck. I see two, repeat, two tangos close in by the windows, as expected. AK- 47s and cigarettes.'
'Cougar Two, roger that. Two tangos in sight.'
'Doesn't look like they're expecting us,' Cougar One, Vic Walters, added.
One point of HAHO drops was that the parachutes opened so far from the target that the crack of unfolding fabric grabbing air couldn't be heard at the target. Another was the ability to literally fly to the target, within certain fairly broad parameters.
'Cougar One, Two, this is Twelve,' Dean said. 'Take them down at your discretion.'
There was no going back now.
