aground, if we hit anything or anything hits us, believe me. The trucks will blow!'
'Perhaps one of the lifeboats. Nehim was thinking furiously. He could take one of the women as hostage, lower a boat —
'Fool!' Hijazi snarled. 'In minutes these waters will be filled with enemy ships, the sky filled with their helicopters! No, if we hold many hostages at gunpoint, they will try to negotiate. We can kill a few at a time, to prove we mean business, to keep them from attacking. And while they negotiate, their people will attempt to dismantle the explosives in the truck.'
'And we shall die.'
'Martyrs' deaths, Yaqub.' He gestured at the two disheveled women glaring at them from a few feet away. 'We will find better than them in Paradise!'
Nehim had serious doubts about the Prophet's description of what awaited true believers in Paradise, but Hijazi's plan offered at least the possibility of escape. They were in the middle of an empty ocean. There was no chance that the cruise ship would run aground out here, or that anything would hit them.
He might survive yet.
'Podesta!' Kellerman barked. 'We need to turn now!'
QM1 John Podesta took the ship's wheel, spinning it hard to the right. 'We won't stop in time,' he said. 'But the Queen is moving forward. Maybe we can miss her by passing astern!'
Kellerman hesitated, his hands above the two throttle levers, one for each of the Sandpiper's screws. His instinct was to throw the ship into reverse, to try to stop the leviathan before it collided with the ship now just five hundred yards ahead.
But with the rudder hard right, with the bow now slowly swinging to the right, toward the other ship's stern, throwing the screws in reverse would actually act against the turn. He remembered reading about some confusion on the bridge when the Titanic had spotted the iceberg, about how an attempt to turn away from the ice had actually swung the bow of the doomed ship toward it.
'That one,' Podesta said, pointing at one of the side-by-side levers. 'All back! The other one, full ahead!' In the old days, these levers would have been engine telegraphs, telling the crew in the engine room what to do. Nowadays the throttles were handled directly from the bridge-7-a good thing, since Kellerman hadn't yet heard the word from the lieutenant that the engine room was secure.
'Why aren't we turning?' Kellerman asked after a moment. The Atlantis Queen still loomed enormous just ahead.
'You don't turn these things on a dime, Chief,' Podesta replied. 'Or stop 'em on one, either. What the hell?'
Podesta was standing on tiptoes, looking down at the forward deck immediately ahead of the deckhouse. In the darkness, a half-dozen men were running forward, some clambering into the helicopter parked midway down the deck, others unfastening the lines securing the aircraft to the deck.
'This is Cold Steel Two,' Kellerman called. Grabbing his H&K, he jogged for the port side bridge wing. 'We have tangos on the forward deck! Looks like they're making for the helo!'
'It'll take 'em an hour to get that thing ready to fly,' Vance told him.
As Kellerman left the enclosure of the bridge, he heard the shrill, rising whine of the helicopter's engine, saw the main rotor begin to turn. Two more tangos were running from the deckhouse as others climbed aboard. He shouldered his weapon and began firing. One of the hijackers fell. Another was hauled through the open doorway by a friend already on board.
The bastards had had the aircraft warmed up and ready.
The question was where they would go. The SEAL unit's pre-mission briefing had mentioned the helicopter, pointing out that by now it was probably so low on fuel it would be useless. Land lay forty miles to the north. They might make it… but would find themselves immediately surrounded by the authorities.
What the hell were they trying to do?
'Cold Steel, Cold Steel,' Rubens' voice said over Kellerman's radio. 'Take that helo down! Now!'
'Yes, sir!' He switched his H&K selector switch to full auto, raised the weapon, and began firing. With the integral suppressor, the H&K made little sound against the rising thunder of the helicopter's main rotor.
Jakowski was joining in from the opposite bridge wing, but the 9mm rounds had little punch to them. With an unsteady lurch, the helicopter lifted from the forward deck, its rotor arc barely clearing the traveling bridge gantry forward.
Kellerman kept firing until his magazine ran dry. He dropped the empty, slapped home a fresh magazine, chambered a round, and began firing again. By now, though, the helicopter was turning away, and Kellerman felt a cold chill of realization.
That helicopter wasn't headed for the mainland.
It was dropping low, low over the black water, nose down and accelerating as it headed straight for the cruise ship ahead.
Yaqub Nehim shoved one of the women hard ahead, sending her sprawling onto the floor as they entered the casino. 'Nobody move!' he screamed, holding the other woman close against his chest, the Makarov pressed up against the side of her head.
'Move to the back of the room!' Hijazi added, gesturing with his AK. 'Quickly! Quickly!'
The old people did as they were told. 'I hope you assholes know you're both going to die,' one old woman said.
'And you will die with us, crone,' Hijazi said. He strode closer to the crowd. 'But if you all do exactly what we tell you, you might live a little longer!'
Nehim was feeling more confident now, more in control. They had twenty hostages here, all of them old people or women. The enemy commandos wouldn't dare attack them now.
And he might yet get out of this.
'Please!' the young woman in his grasp begged, twisting, whimpering. 'Please let me go!'
He let her turn around until she was facing him, then squeezed her close with his left arm. To Nehim's eyes, to his culture, the whore was half-naked, her legs bare, the swell of her breasts clearly defined beneath the Western T-shirt she wore.
'No, whore,' he told her. He brought his left hand up to grab the long hair at the back of her head, dragging her face closer to his. His right hand, holding the pistol, waved at the darkness beyond the casino's windows. 'You and I have the rest of the night to enjoy!'
He tried to kiss her.
Her knee came up hard, a sharp, savage shock squarely into his groin.
Gunfire cracked, two shots. At first, the sagging Nehim thought that Hijazi had opened fire… but as he dropped to his knees he saw that a man had been hiding an AK-47 behind the back of another elderly man just in front of him, that it had been he who'd brought the weapon up and fired two rounds into Hijazi, who was collapsing onto the deck.
Nehim started to raise his pistol, but one of the elderly women nearby whipped her cane up and around and cracked it hard across his wrist, sending the gun flying. An instant later, the cold, black muzzle of a second AK slammed hard against the side of his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a woman who might have been his grandmother beaming at him.
'Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker,' she told him sweetly. 'Arnie Schwarzenegger said that, in True Lies — '
'It was Bruce Willis in Die Hard,' another grandmother, the one with the cane, said. 'Get your movie quotes straight, Anne.'
She picked up the dropped Makarov and smiled at him.
Dean sat with his back against the railing. 'You're Ghailiani?'
'Yes, sir,' the Ship's Security officer said. He quirked a smile. 'Nice trick with the computer virus, and locking
