the stick grazed the side of his head, knocking him back a step. The gunman hovered there, as though trying to decide who to kill, Dean or the old woman.
' 'Do no harm to the elderly, and do not strike the infirm, for it is hateful in the eyes of Allah,'' Dean said, touching the wound on his scalp with his fingertips. They came away slick with blood. 'Isn't that what your Qur'an says?'
'You… you know the holy book, the words of the Prophet?'
'A little. I know it teaches you that if you kill the innocent, you burn in Hell!'
The man's eyes widened a bit more. 'Leave them, Rashid!' another gunman said.
Turning suddenly, he waved the elderly group away. 'Go back!' he said. 'All of you! Go back! Stay here!'
Dean helped the woman up off the deck. 'Thank you, young man,' she said. 'Just like Bruce Willis!'
A passenger, an older man, took her hand. 'Come along, Ms. Jordan. Let's stay out of their way.'
One of the gunmen was left behind to collect the three dropped AK assault rifles. The others urged the younger captives forward. One nudged Dean in the ribs with his rifle. 'Now move! Quick! Yallah!'
Dean let himself be nudged along.
'That was very brave,' Howorth said quietly, moving close beside him as they moved into the passageway. 'Do you really know the Qur'an?'
Dean glanced around to make sure none of the terrorists was within earshot. 'No,' he whispered, 'and neither do they. Most of them, anyway.'
'What do you mean?'
'In my experience, most Christians don't know the Bible very well. My guess is that most Muslims are the same with the Qur'an. The fundamentalists like to pick and choose which verses they'll use, and argue about interpretations… but only the scholars know the book well. Just like with most Christians.'
'And my guess is that you're damned lucky!'
The group hurried forward through the ship.
'Very well,' Khalid said, speaking into the radio handset. 'Hurry!'
He handed the microphone back to Fakhet, then stepped back out onto the bridge. The Pacific Sandpiper was a mile away, and it would take her time to complete her turn.
Khalid considered keeping the Adantis Queen on the same heading, due north. The coast of Massachusetts was out there, the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. If he ran the Queen aground there, it would create an appropriately spectacular disaster.
But not, perhaps, spectacular enough. Al-Qaeda's message would be so much sharper, so much more to the point, if it was delivered to Manhattan. 'Bring us back to the left,' he told the man at the helm. 'And reduce speed to ten knots.' Khalid wanted the Pacific Sandpiper to catch up with them.
Aziz had reported in moments before. Passengers in the casino said they'd seen black-clad men parachute onto the pool deck — probably SAS. They'd apparently killed three guards back there and now were on Deck Ten, moving forward.
Khalid retrieved his AKM assault rifle from the electronic chart table and checked the action. Let them come. He was ready for them.
As for the passengers, he'd ordered them moved to the Neptune Theater. If there was going to be a firelight, he wanted them in a controlled place, where he could have his men begin shooting them if the attackers got too close.
And as a last resort, he would detonate the radioactive canisters in the hold.
Yaqub Nehim grinned down at the struggling woman. 'Perhaps you would like it if we tied your hands again?' He let his hand move along her leg, caressing.
'Get your hands off of me, you asshole!' the woman screamed. She tried to slap him, and he blocked the clumsy swing easily.
'You son of a bitch! Leave her alone!' The ship's chief security officer lunged at him, but Nehim whipped the muzzle of his pistol around and caught the man on the side of his face.
'Yaqub!' Ra'id Hijazi called from farther up the theater aisle. 'Leave the woman alone! This is not the time!'
'Mind your own business, Ra'id! I've been looking forward to this since we came on board!' Yaqub gave a harsh, bitter laugh. 'It's not like any of us will survive this voyage, right?'
'Women are a trap of Satan!' Hijazi said, quoting an ancient hadith, a traditional quote from the sayings of Mohammed.
''Forbidden are married women,'' Nehim replied, ''except those you own as slaves!' Surah Four-twenty! We can do as we like with these whores!'
It wasn't rape and it wasn't illegal when the woman refused to be properly dressed. These Western bitches paraded around half-naked all the time, putting themselves on display. Often they did not even go out accompanied by a husband or another male relative. They deserved whatever they got. In fact, most fundamentalist Islamic regimes condoned forcing condemned female prisoners to have sex, since the holy Qur'an forbade putting a virgin to death.
He doubted that these women were virgins, but they all were certainly under a sentence of death. It wouldn't hurt to make sure, just with one of them…
Yaqub Nehim cared little for the Sharia or the tenets of his religion, and his knowledge of the Qur'an extended just far enough to provide a rationalization for what he would have done anyway. He'd gotten into trouble with the authorities in his native Saudi Arabia over his attempt to have sex with a foreign woman, an Italian, in Medina five years ago. The ulema hearing Yaqub's case, the religious judge, had offered him a choice — prison or joining a jihadist group dedicated to destroying the enemies of Islam.
He'd accepted recruitment. He knew what Saudi prisons were like.
As for accepting martyrdom… well, there was still time. Perhaps one of the lifeboats…
The door at the back of the theater banged open, and passengers spilled inside. Nehim let go of the struggling woman and stood, raising his AK-47 in case this was the vanguard of a prisoner revolt. Then he saw Aziz and Baqr and others of his mujahideen comrades, funneling the prisoners in through the door.
'What have you brought us, Rashid?' he asked Aziz. There were attractive women in this group as well. One in particular…
'They were in the casino,' Aziz replied. He glanced at the woman in the seat next to Nehim, who was trying to straighten her clothing. 'None of that, Nehim,' he snapped. 'We have work to do. Holy work!'
'What work?'
'The enemy has boarded the ship! Three of our brothers are dead! Guard the prisoners well, and keep your pants buckled. There will be time for games later!'
Nehim helped herd the new batch of prisoners down the aisle as Aziz and the others turned and headed back out into the Deck One mall area. Hijazi was giving Nehim a smug, I-told-you-so look, but he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and ignored him.
That was the problem. There would be no time later, not if the enemy was already coming on board the ship. Nehim had been hungering for one of the half-naked bitches for a week, and in all likelihood the hijacked liner was going to be blown to bits within the next few minutes. Damn Khalid, and damn the sanctimonious Saudi ulema who'd put him here!
He was going to have one of these bitches before he died, no matter what Hijazi or Aziz or the Amir himself might say.
The question was, which one?
'Face the front of the theater,' Rubens said, looking closely at the schematic showing the Neptune Theater. Pinpoints of red light representing forty more passengers had just entered the room and were moving down toward
