'It's definitely rigged as an IND,' he said. The acronym stood for 'Improvised Nuclear Device' and referred to radiological material designed to be spread by a conventional explosion. Quickly Yancey described what he could see of the circuitry and told them what he'd done. 'But I don't trust it,' he said. 'Part of the battery lead is hidden, and I can't get at it. Not without lifting a stack of cardboard boxes as tall as I am.'
'Go ahead and get out of there, David,' Rubens told him. 'The SAS assault lifted off from the Ark Royal twenty minutes ago, and we have more helos inbound from the Eisenhower They should be there in another ten. We have a NEST on the way with the American helicopters.'
'NEST' stood for 'Nuclear Emergency Support Team,' the unit under the jurisdiction of the U. S. Department of Energy tasked with responding to all types of accidents and emergencies involving nuclear material, including bomb threats.
'Roger that,' Yancey said. He felt exhausted. He wondered if he was already feeling the effects of the radiation.
Before he left, though, he took another look at the back of the truck. Odd. The boxes of explosives weren't stacked neatly and squarely. Maybe that was what had been tugging at his subconscious… the fact that several boxes were jammed in every which way, carelessly, and several were tipped up on one edge, leaving space beneath. Reaching into the back of the truck, he grabbed one of the tipped boxes and lifted it, dragging it aside.
A hand grenade had been placed underneath the box, its pin already pulled. Yancey saw the metal arming lever pop off, saw the grenade skitter across the flatbed, its three-second fuse already burning…
Chapter 27
Khalid glowered at the night, which was just beginning to show the faintest flush of light in the east. He'd just lost touch with his men in the theater and in the A Deck hold aft. The attackers were moving too fast, too precisely, for his men to manage a coordinated defense. On the chart table he could see the blips of approaching aircraft — helicopters, most likely, from the British and American task forces that had been dogging them.
It was time to give up on the dream of setting off the explosives inside New York Harbor, of spreading death and revenge across Manhattan and much of New England. If Ra'd and the others in the hold were not answering, they must be dead… and Ra'd had failed to press the button on the detonator.
The booby traps set within the trucks might yet set off the entire load of explosives, would set them off if any of the attackers were foolish enough to try to dismantle the battery wires.
But Khalid still needed to make sure, and there was one way to do that.
Striding to the door leading to the radio room, he snatched up the radio and pressed the transmit key. 'Ramid! Ramid, are you there?'
There was a crackle of static. Then, 'I hear you, Amir.'
'Execute Ya!'
Everything said over the radio was in code or in very carefully phrased speech; the enemy, Khalid knew well, was listening to everything. Ya was the final letter of the standard Arabic alphabet, and as the end of the series it carried the same sense of finality as the Greek omega, the English z. The ending.
'Execute Plan Ya,' Abdel Ramid echoed from the Pacific Sandpiper. 'Allah be praised!'
Khalid did not reply. Allah, if He existed at all, had thwarted Operation Zarqawi, as He had thwarted so much else.
Allah, if He existed, would have no part of this ending.
David Yancey saw the armed grenade bounce across the flatbed of the truck. If it exploded there, next to tons of explosives and at least one primed and ready blasting cap, sympathetic detonation would cause all of the C-4 in all three trucks to explode. He dived on the grenade instantly, scooping it up and rolling toward the open tailgate, whipping it around in his right hand as he rolled and flinging it as hard and as far as he could, even as he fell off the back of the truck.
He was aiming high, for the far side of that line of refrigerators if he could make it. The grenade exploded in mid-air before it reached them.
The explosion was piercingly loud in the cavernous metal-walled vault of the A Deck hold. Shrapnel rattled off the truck and the bulkheads and something struck his leg and his side as he fell and slammed full-length into the deck.
He lay there for a long moment, panting, rejoicing in the pain because it meant he was still alive.
Up past Kleito's Temple on Deck Ten, Dean led three men spiraling up the service stairwell. It had been all he could do to pull the others from the theater and lead them up here. CJ and the other woman might be killed as soon as their value as hostages was outweighed by the trouble they caused… and knowing CJ, she was capable of plenty of trouble. But Rubens had ordered Dean to play it by the book, and the book said to gain control of the ship's bridge, where the terrorist commander would almost certainly be trying to put together a last-ditch defense of the hijacked vessel.
Dean decided he would have to trust that CJ would take care of herself.
But, damn it, she was a desk jockey, a computer geek, not a trained field agent.
At Deck Eleven, someone with an AK-47 opened fire from above, loosing an entire magazine on full auto down the stairs.
Brisard had brought along Dean's H&K, combat harness, vest, and helmet, and he'd pulled those on over his civilian clothing, giving him an oddly mismatched look with his jeans and tennis shoes. Snapping a fresh mag into his H&K, he loosed a burst up the stairwell. The tango responded with another burst of AK fire, bullets screeching wildly as they ricocheted off steel railings, steps, and bulkheads. Tim Morgan cursed as a fragment off a vailing scratched his face, leaving a thin trail of blood.
'Where are they?' Dean asked Rubens, sheltering under the steps. 'And how many?' The bad guys could hold them pinned here all day.
'You have four people in the Security-IT suite, Deck Eleven,' Rubens told him. 'There are six on Deck Twelve. That's three on the bridge, two in the radio room, and one in the stairwell above you. Five more are outside, on Deck Eleven, further aft.'
'Waiting to ambush us between the casino and here,' Dean said. 'What about the two guys who left the theater?'
'We're tracking them. One is taking the two women down a passageway on Deck Four. He might be looking for a stateroom. The other is going up the Grand Staircase, passing Deck Five now. We're tracking them both.' There was a hesitation. 'One tango left Security a few minutes ago. You just missed him by a few seconds. He went down the stairwell you're in now. Deck Ten.'
Dean tried to hold the described positions in his mind, a three-dimensional map of the enemy's positions. On the one hand, having the Art Room peering into the ship and identifying the locations of each person on board did a lot to lift the age-old fog of war.
On the other hand, it was damned tough to keep track of it all. 'What about our people in the hold?'
'The situation there is under control.' Rubens sounded stressed as he said it, though, and Dean wondered what he was hiding. 'Helicopters are inbound, about ten minutes out. A NEST is on board.'
'Okay, then,' Rubens said. 'Throw the switch.'
'Done… '
By injecting the HTML code into the Atlantis Queen's computer system, the Art Room had turned all of the computers in the ship's IT section into zombies — that was what the techies called them — and admin control now
