the front.
'Okay,' Dean's voice came back from an overhead speaker. The dots representing him and Walters were green. Both were carrying ID passkey cards provided by Royal Sky Line before the mission. There were well over a hundred colored pinpoints already within the theater, a mingling of red and blue.
Not counting the blips representing Dean and Walters, there were eighty-eight green, people carrying crew- member IDs. Many of those would be terrorists, but most would be prisoners, crew members brought to the theater. Separating the two was going to be tough.
'We've identified five tangos surrounding your group,' Rubens said, 'the ones who brought you in. They're at twelve o'clock, two o'clock, five o'clock, six o'clock, and nine o'clock.'
'Rog. Got 'em spotted.'
'You have four shooters in the Deck Two balcony. Two o'clock, four o'clock, eight o'clock, and ten o'clock.'
Again there was a pause. 'Okay. I have them. And I saw two outside the Deck One doors. Any more?'
'There may be others mixed in with the prisoners. We can't differentiate here.'
see one, yeah. One o'clock, thirty feet away. He's hassling a couple of women. Damn it… one of them is CJ! Our GCHQ contact!'
Rubens checked the indicated area. Two green blips overlapped, close beside several blues. 'We see them.'
'Ten targets. That'll take some shooting.'
'Charlie, I recommend that you wait. The tangos who brought you down here will probably be leaving soon. And Brisard and three men are on their way on Deck Two. They'll be there in a few minutes.'
'Rog. We'll wait.' Almost a minute later, Dean spoke again. 'Listen… that son of a bitch mixed in with the hostages. He's just grabbed a woman… no, two women! CJ and someone else! He's leading them up the other aisle!'
Ruben saw the dots, one blue, two green, moving closely together toward the door. 'I see them.'
'We need to take him now.'
'You need to sit tight, Dean. Brisard's's almost there.'
'Damn it, Bill!'
'By the book, Dean. By the book.'
The three points of light moved through the door and into the passageway.
'They're gone,' Dean said.
'You'll have your chance in a moment.'
Brisard and the other three operators were nearly at the theater's Deck Two entrance
Chapter 26
Dean and Walters walked all the way down the aisle, to a point where they could see all four of the terrorist shooters in the second-floor balcony The five who'd brought them here were all leaving, at the top of the aisle and filing through the doors.
'Brisard's at the door on the second deck,' Rubens' voice warned.
'Right. Walters? Get ready!'
Together the two men reached behind their backs and drew their pistols, sitting down in theater seats on opposite sides of the aisle as they did so, keeping the weapons carefully hidden.
The theater was a gaudy, glitzy explosion of Baroque architecture, heavy on the gold paint and curlicues, filled with Nereids and dolphins, seashells and seahorses, nets and tridents. An enormous figure of Neptune — the Roman Poseidon, the god who'd supposedly founded Atlantis —: emerged from the bulkhead directly above the stage.
Their guards were leaning on the balcony railings, looking down into the auditorium, but they seemed to just be watching, not preparing to massacre the hostages. If any of them took aim, Dean was ready to pull out his weapon and begin firing, Brisard or no Brisard.
Dean was angry about the one tango he'd seen leaving the theater with two captives. For Dean, the horror of extremist Muslim fundamentalists wasn't their religion; so far as he was concerned, people could believe what they wanted. He knew that moderate Islamic clerics taught justice and equality, including equality for women, a fairly advanced concept for a Prophet born in the sixth century. The problem was that too many fundamentalists of all religions relied not on their scriptures but on local custom and belief… and then went through their holy books looking for isolated verses that would justify those beliefs. If your culture already believed that women were second-class citizens or worse, it wasn't hard to make the Qur'an support your prejudice.
As a result, there were Muslim societies where women were forbidden to go to school, where their genitals were mutilated, where rape victims were imprisoned and even killed, where a woman who didn't wear the veil was automatically responsible for whatever a Muslim male decided to do to her:
All in the name of Allah, the merciful, the all-knowing.
'Keep tracking those three,' he murmured to Rubens.
'We are. Stand by. Brisard is coming in.'
'Walters!' Dean snapped. 'Ready…'
'We're at the infirmary,' Yancey said. Behind him were five of the jumpers in a strung-out line. They'd ditched their oxygen bottles and masks but were still in their combat blacks. Their NVG monoculars were in place, their gain tuned down to allow for the ship's ambient lighting but still revealing the aim points for the IR laser sights.
'Copy that,' Caravaggio replied. 'We have you on the board. The passageway is clear ahead of you, all the way through the galley. You have one green light standing next to the far door inside the galley, probably a tango guard, and ten more in small groups left and right — probably galley staff.'
'Roger that.' They would have to sort tangos from crew members when they went in.
Hiding there behind the bar up in the casino had been one of the toughest things David P. Yancey had ever done — and he'd been through SEAL training and Hell Week, through a deployment in Afghanistan and two tours in Iraq, none of it exactly easy duty. Crouching there in silence, looking up with weapons ready to open fire if they were discovered or if the tangos started slaughtering hostages, they'd waited out the confrontation in the casino, emerging only after one of the elderly women — a Ms. Caruthers — had called out 'Ally ally outs in free!'
There were ten of them, now, with Walters and Dean on their way forward with the terrorists. After briefly consulting with the Art Room, Tom Brisard had taken three of the men and headed forward, intent on following Dean and Walters to wherever the hostages were being led. Yancey took the remaining five and, guided by Caravaggio back in the Art Room, found a service stairwell that would take them all the way down to A Deck.
They emerged in a passageway outside the ship's infirmary. Several civilians, including two of the ship's doctors, clustered around them. 'Are you here to rescue us?' one, an older woman, asked.
'We're going to try, ma'am,' Yancey had replied. 'All of you stay here and stay down!'
'Dr. Barnes! Have you seen him? The terrorists took him… '
'We'll take care of it, ma'am.' Brushing aside other questions, they'd moved aft down the central passageway leading from the infirmary to the massive watertight door leading to the galley.
Coulter and Yancey took the lead, since both of them had suppressed H&Ks, while Boone and Michelson carried combat shotguns, and Daniels and O'Brien had assault rifles. He took a stance, weapon braced against his shoulder, and said, 'Go!' Daniels swiped an ID card through the reader, and Michelson pushed the door open.
Beyond was the gleaming expanse of the galley for the Atlantia Restaurant, one deck above. At the far end of the room, a lone man in a khaki uniform and holding an AK slouched in a chair, looking bored. Both Coulter and Yancey opened up with sharp, precise three-round bursts, their fire guided by the infrared dots visible through their
