rested with the Art Room. Not only did they have control of the security cameras and computer displays, but they also had control over every one of the automated door locks on the ship, all of which normally were programmed from the IT department but which now were being controlled by Rubens' team at Fort Meade.
They'd just locked every key-card door on the ship.
Another burst of gunfire thundered down the stairwell. Dean slapped Henderson on the shoulder. 'Hit him with the frag-12s.'
Sam Henderson, a former Army Special Forces staff sergeant, nodded and pressed the release catch for the ammo drum on his AA-12 combat shotgun. Dropping the 32-round drum with its normal load-out of 12-gauge shot, he pulled out a smaller, 20-round drum loaded with frag-12 rounds.
The frag-12 had been developed especially for combat shotguns, a 19mm grenade with four tiny, curved stabilizing fins that unfolded as it left the weapon's muzzle. The armor-piercing versions could blast through a half inch of steel plate, and a barrage of the deadly little slugs fired at three hundred rounds per minute created a firestorm of death and devastation.
Henderson chambered the first round. Dean leaned out from under the cover provided by the steps overhead and opened fire with his H&K, spraying wildly to make the gunman overhead duck back. Henderson stepped past Dean, raised his AA-12, and fired a long burst of frag-12s into the upper level. Explosions cracked and banged overhead, and someone screamed as an AK-47 bounced and clattered down the steel steps. Henderson fired another high-explosive burst, and then Dean and the others pounded up the stairs.
The tango lay on the deck in front of a partially wrecked door, covered with blood and trying to pull a pistol from his belt. Dean shot him twice in the head and kept moving.
In the passageway beyond the broken door, a second security door blocked the way Beyond were the radio room and the bridge, and five cornered tangos…
The Advanced SEAL Delivery System, a dry-deck submarine sixty-five feet long and displacing sixty tons, was a relatively new addition to the combat inventory of the U. S. Navy SEAL teams. On board, besides the two submarine officers serving as pilot and navigator, were sixteen Navy SEALs equipped for VBSS operations, the acronym standing for 'Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure.'
Over an hour before, they'd left the warmth and security of the USS Ohio, a former ballistic missile submarine converted to Navy Special Warfare service, now a transport carrying up to sixty-four SEALs and the ASDS on her afterdeck. The SEALs had climbed a ladder up into the midget sub's spherical air lock and taken their places in the closely fitted seats aft. The Ohio had taken them to a rendezvous point just ahead of the oncoming Pacific Sandpiper and released them.
For an hour, now, the ASDS had played tag with the Sandpiper, attempting to close for boarding. The Sandpiper had changed course several times, however, and currently was heading almost due north, toward the Atlantis Queen, almost half a mile away.
When the Sandpiper had swung north, however, the ASDS pilot, anticipating the vessel's attempt to close with the cruise ship, had been able to aim for a point well ahead of the Sandpiper, then turn north, with the transport pounding down on the midget sub's wake.
Guided by satellite tracking systems, the sixty-foot submarine had allowed herself to be overtaken by the 322-foot freighter bearing down on her at twenty-two knots.
The miniature submarine's maximum speed, while classified, was in excess of eight knots — about half of the plutonium transport's best speed. There was no way for the minisub to catch the freighter in a stern chase, but a bit of luck and some skillful seamanship on the part of the pilot and navigator had put the ASDS in the perfect position for an intercept at speed.
As the freighter passed the submarine's starboard side, pushing the tiny vessel along on its bow wave, Gunner's Mate Chief Randolph Kellerman had popped the ASDS's upper hatch, leaned out into the cold, slashing spray, and fired a grappling line high into the night. He was aiming for the top of the high, dark, wet steel wall passing a few yards away. The grappling hook missed its hold on the first shot; he dropped the gun over the side, took a second from RM1 Garrison, who was clinging to the ladder inside the air lock just below him in the hatch, and took aim for a second shot.
This time, the grapple snagged hard on the Sandpiper's port railing. The near end of the line was secured to a deck cleat and drawn taut. Inexorably the ASDS was drawn close alongside the larger vessel. Kellerman deployed several fenders to keep the hulls from grinding together, secured a second line aft, then unshipped a boarding hook. The device was a twenty-four-foot telescoping pole that extended and locked with a hook on the end, and a snap- down two-footed brace at the foot to hold it out from the hull.
Swinging the hook over the railing directly overhead, Kellerman gave it an experimental tug, then started to climb.
Khalid hated the night.
It hadn't always been that way. But six years earlier, he as Rahid Sayed as-Saadi, and his two older brothers, Hammed and Abdul, had been part of an insurgent team in Iraq, working with the Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, known to the West as al-Qaeda in Iraq. The three brothers had been on a mission with three others in a suburb of Baghdad one night, well past midnight.
They'd been told in the training camps that the night was their friend, that the American and Coalition forces feared the night and would fear the soldiers of Allah who made the night their own. The six of them had been crouched beside a pickup truck and a ruined mud-brick wall, preparing an old Russian artillery shell as an IED. The plan was to bury the shell beside the road, then detonate it by radio when an American patrol passed in the morning. With the bomb prepared, the six of them had knelt in a circle to pray.
But first, the young as-Saadi had excused himself and walked a few meters away to urinate on the other side of the wall. The bomb — he'd been told later it must have been one of the damnable American 'smart bombs' guided to their target by laser — had glided out of the night and landed squarely in the middle of the other five fedayeen as they prayed for success, exploding with savage ferocity and precision.
He'd found himself almost ten meters away, unharmed but stunned, his ears ringing and blood streaming from his nose. The wall had been leveled, the truck shredded. By the firelight of the burning fuel tank he'd found Abdul's head, lying on the road, the eyes wide and staring.
They'd never even had a chance to strike a single blow in the holy name of Allah.
And that had been the beginning of the end of as-Saadi's faith. His brother fedayeen claimed to see the hand of God everywhere, with each victory won against the invading Coalition forces, with each American killed, with each enemy vehicle destroyed… and yet, step by step, battle by battle, the war in Iraq had been lost. Lost. It was unthinkable.
And al-Qaeda hadn't exactly fought the war with intelligence and cunning. Savage, wasteful attacks against rival militias, against the Shia heretics, even against the growing Iraqi police and military forces, the American puppets, seemed to have a negative effect. The ordinary people of the villages and towns and city suburbs, the people al-Qaeda needed in order to hide, to move, to fight… as the years passed, those people had begun turning against the insurgents.
Eventually Rahid as-Saadi had moved up in the al-Qaeda hierarchy, attracting the attention of several of the Leader's senior lieutenants. As-Saadi had submitted a plan to seize a British plutonium transport ship.. then amended it to include the cruise ship. By sailing both ships together into New York Harbor, he would ensure one of two outcomes would ensue. Either the radioactive cargo, or part of it, could be scattered across all of Manhattan as a deadly, poisonous dust on the wind, the poison blowing as far up the coast as Maine… or the Americans would be forced to sink both ships and kill over three thousand innocent people to prevent that far greater disaster. America would be humiliated before the world.
And Yusef Khalid would die on the Adantis Queen's bridge, claiming vengeance for Abdul and for Hammed, but, more important, focusing the cause of Jihad back where it belonged… not on religious extremism, not on the differences between Sunni and Shia, but on the need to strike the hated West again and again and yet again at the points where they were most vulnerable.
Iraq and Afghanistan had bled al-Qaeda nearly dry. A successful attack, one killing thousands, perhaps tens
