monoculars. The man sprawled backward, arms flying to either side and weapon clattering to the deck as he slammed against the door at his back, then spilled from the overturning chair and sprawled in front of it in an untidy heap.
'One tango down,' Yancey said as the six Black Cats rolled through the open door in swift succession, keeping their weapons up. Cooks, stewards, and galley assistants stood to either side, some screaming, some taking cover behind tables and food prep stations.
'Stay down!' Coulter barked. 'Everybody down! Hands on your heads!'
There was no time to check for terrorists mixed in with crew members; Yancey saw no obvious tangos anywhere else in the galley, but that didn't mean they weren't there. So long as he saw no weapons, however, he kept moving forward, H&K at his shoulder, making for the far door.
'There… there are terrorists in there!' one young woman called out.
'We have four tangos inside the after hold,' Caravaggio said over his radio headset. 'All together, all toward your right as you go in, at roughly two o'clock.'
'Stay down! Nobody move!' O'Brien called out, moving backward across the galley as he brought up the rear. Yancey and Coulter both dropped their half-empty magazines and popped in fresh ones, took stances in front of the door, and waited for Boone, Michelson, and Daniels to get into position between and behind them. 'Go!'
The door to the aft hold opened, and Yancey stepped through, immediately pivoting to keep his weapon and its dancing IR spot aimed toward the four tangos inside. From the door, however, all he could see was an enormous stack of massive crates and cardboard boxes, bank upon bank of refrigerators, steel shelves, and piles of canned goods and boxed food.
'They heard you,' Caravaggio warned. 'Two targets, moving toward you and toward your right.'
The trouble was, Yancey knew, that back in the Art Room they were looking at nice, clean deck schematics and they couldn't see the mountains of supplies that were providing cover at the moment for four jihadist tangos. It was comforting knowing how many tangos they faced and what their general direction was, but that didn't make getting at them very much easier.
'Boone! With me!' Yancey started forward, following the main open pathway leading aft from the door.
'Rest of you with me!' Coulter added. He broke to the right and started climbing a pile of wooden crates fifteen feet high.
'Watch out for hot tubs,' Yancey said, grinning. Coulter's jumpsuit was still sopping wet from his accidental immersion in a spa on the Atlas Pool deck.
'Yancey!' Caravaggio said, her voice urgent. 'Two tangos right in front ofyou Range ten feet!'
What was right in front of him was a line of refrigerators forming the right-hand wall of the passageway he and Boone were following. It looked like there was a cross-passage just ahead, however. Gun still tight against his shoulder, Yancey broke into a run.
Swinging around the corner of the last refrigerator, he came face-to-face with two bearded men, khaki-clad, both holding AKs at port arms. Reflexively his finger tapped the trigger before his brain had fully processed what he was seeing; a three-round burst of 9 mm bullets slashed into the face and throat of the closest man, spinning him roughly aside.
An instant behind Yancey's burst, Boone opened up with his AA-12, the combat shotgun set on full auto. With a fire rate of three hundred rounds per minute, the weapon loosed a thundering barrage of four blasts in less than a second, the 12-gauge shot ripping into both terrorists and cutting them apart. Blood splashed across the refrigerator, stacks of crates, and the deck.
'Two more down!' Yancey called, stepping across one of the bodies. Ahead he could now see the inside of the main outer doors to the cargo hold. Fifty feet to the right of those were three trucks, with enclosed cargo decks and open tailgates.
But he couldn't see the other two tangos.
A door opened on the second-level balcony in the back of the theater. There were two tangos back there, one to the left, one to the right, and they both turned at the sound.
Dean lifted his SIG Sauer, dropping into a kneeling crouch and bracing the weapon in a two-handed stance, aiming at the gunman on the right-side balcony forward. The man had also heard the door and was turning to face it, raising his AK.
The range was a good fifty feet from the front-row seats to the front balcony one level up, a long shot for a pistol. Long hours on the practice range, however, had let Dean qualify as an expert, both with his beloved accurized M1911A1 and with the SIG Sauer P226. Releasing his pent-up breath halfway, he squeezed with his whole hand.
The shot came as a surprise, as it should in careful marksmanship. The terrorist lurched to one side, twisting, as the AK in his hands went off, the muzzle flash long and stuttering in the theater's dim light.
People in the theater screamed, some bolting in panic, others trying to duck down among the rows of seats. Dean reacquired and fired again, and the terrorist dropped out of sight behind the balcony railing.
At Dean's back, Walters fired again and again as his target jackknifed over the railing, then dropped twenty feet to the deck. Brisard and his people were moving down the balcony aisles at the same moment, firing at the two terrorist gunmen there. Dean pivoted, ready to add his fire to theirs, but both tangos were already dropping.
The back doors to Deck One swung open, however, and two more terrorists rushed in — the guards who'd been standing outside, obviously brought in by the burst of AK fire. Dean dropped his aim and fired twice at one, then pivoted to aim at the other… but held his fire. Panicking civilians were everywhere, scattering as one of the newly arrived terrorists opened fire with his AK.
'Get down! Everybody down!' Dean yelled.
One young man stood up, shirtless, waving his arms.
Omar Mohammed Ra'd heard the echoing thud-thud-thud-thud of a heavy weapon close by and leaped toward the trucks.
Aram and Fahaj had left moments before to investigate the opening of the door to the galley. No one was supposed to come through that door unless word came from the Amir himself that it was okay. In retrospect, it might have been better for the men guarding the trucks in the hold to have stayed in place, concealed and ready to open fire on any intruders… but the four of them had not been chosen for their combat experience or their tactical expertise.
Ra'd was the oldest of them, and he was just nineteen. He was Egyptian, the son of a poverty-crippled family in a suburb of Cairo. He'd joined the revived Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a militant Egyptian group that had united with al-Qaeda in 2006. From a training camp in Egypt he'd been sent to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, where he'd first met Amir Rahid Sayed as-Saadi and transferred to the Islamic Jihad International Brigade.
Ra'd and the three with him had been chosen, as-Saadi told them, because of their faith.
And Ra'd was dedicated to the way of submission, to Allah and Islam and the word of the Prophet. Ra'd had welcomed the opportunity offered by the Amir to guard the trucks and their tons of high explosives and to detonate those explosives if at any time the enemies of Islam tried to take them. The four of them had been warned not to wander too close to the trucks, that there was a deadly poison inside the trucks on top of the explosives, but if enemy forces tried to break into the ship's hold, they were to detonate the explosives immediately.
The detonator lay on a small folding table set up next to one of the trucks, at the end of a long, black coil of rubber-sheathed cable. A car battery rested in the deck beneath, connected with a tangle of electrical cables leading into each vehicle. All he needed to do was turn the arming key on the detonator and press the red button.
Behind him, Said Shalabi snatched up his rifle. 'Go, Omar! Go, and I will cover you!' To his left, Aram and Fajah tumbled across the deck in an explosion of wet scarlet, as two ominous figures in black rounded a line of refrigerators holding foodstuffs for the galley.
One of the figures shouted something… but Ra'd spoke no language but Arabic — specifically the Egyptian dialect. He'd had trouble understanding his brothers from Syria and Morocco.
The thunder sounded again, and something shrieked off the bulkhead behind him. Heart pounding, he
