"Doesn't look like they're doing much search and rescue now. Think they've already finished?"
"I don't know. Please pass the word to Dr. Barnes. I expect we'll have mass casualties coming on board as soon as we reach that other ship."
"Yes, sir. How are we going to take them aboard?"
It was an interesting problem in marine logistics. The Atlantis Queen was 964 feet long. The Pacific Sandpiper, if he remembered the article right, was a third of that, about 325 feet long, and her main deck would be about thirty feet above her waterline. The simplest means of getting injured men from the Sandpiper's deck onto the Queen would be to bring the two ships close alongside, securing them together with lines and rigging a gangway across from the Sandpiper's deck into either one of the A Deck cargo doors or, possibly, directly into the quarterdeck access on the First Deck. One of the cargo deck entryways would be best, Phillips decided. The ship's infirmary was on A Deck to begin with, and there'd be no need to haul injured crewmen down one of the ship's ladders.
The touchy part would be doing all of this at sea. They would put out fenders, of course, to keep the hulls of the two vessels from grinding together… but the seas were rough enough and high enough that there would be a certain amount of danger involved. Not enough to hole one of the ships, certainly, unless someone did something incredibly stupid, but there would be a considerable risk of injury, or of someone falling over the side.
He picked up an intercom handset. "Sparks!" he called.
"Yes, Captain?" The Queen's chief radio officer was Peter Jablonsky, the radio shack just aft of the bridge.
"Raise the Pacific Sandpiper, please. Tell them I intend to come alongside their starboard side. Ask them if they have injured on board.. and ask them if we should lower boats to help look for survivors."
"Very well, Captain."
"To answer your question, Number One," Phillips continued, "I'm not sure. I think the best thing to do would be to rig a gangway from their forward deck up to our port side A Deck cargo access and bring people on board that way."
"Seas are kind of high for that, Captain."
"But not that high. Not if we're both bow-on into the sea. And it'll save time over trying to rig a boatswain's chair, or lower people down one at a time from the helicopter."
"Yes, sir."
Cruise ships like the Atlantis Queen numbered their passenger decks First, Second, Third, and so on, going from bottom to top, with the First Deck generally being the level at which passengers entered from the dock. The crew decks, however, were given alphabetical identifiers, starting immediately under the First Deck with A Deck and going down to B, C, and D Decks below. On the Queen, A Deck was the lowest deck with portholes — though these were permanently closed — and the level for the cargo hold entry doors, while B Deck was just above the waterline. That meant that the Pacific Sandpiper's forward deck would be at roughly the same level, the same distance above the water, as the Queen's A Deck.
"Captain?" Jablonsky called. "They say to come on in, port to starboard."
"Let's do it," Phillips said. "Helm, bring us two points to starboard."
And the Atlantic Queen began closing with the smaller freighter.
Fuchida leaned back from the console, removing the headset. Abdel Ramid was standing behind him. "What did they say?" he asked in Arabic.
"They will come alongside," Fuchida replied in the same language, "their left side to our right. They will rig a kind of bridge to cross from our deck to their cargo hold."
Ramid grinned. "They're making it easy for us."
"It's happening as we planned it," Fuchida said, shrugging. "They have to respond to an emergency at sea, and they have much better emergency medical services on board… to take care of all of those rich, pampered tourists. Do you have everyone, all of the prisoners, off the deck and out of sight?"
Ramid nodded. "The prisoners from outside all have been moved to the crew's recreation area, their hands and feet have been tied, and they are under heavy guard. The ship's crew has also retrieved the small boat, with two more of your people on board."
"Inui and Yano," Fuchida said. "Are they okay?"
"Half-drowned and suffering from immersion in cold water, but they seem to be recovering," Ramid said. "They were well enough to hold the two crewmen in the boat at gunpoint until we could bring them aboard."
Fuchida could only imagine the thoughts of the Ishikari crewmen still out there in the water, clinging to rafts and wreckage as they watched the Sandpiper take her small boat back on board and begin to move off toward the horizon. The ship was almost a mile, now, from where the Ishikari had gone down.
"And the crewmen on board this ship?" Fuchida asked.
Ramid jerked his head, indicating the bridge behind him. "The bridge personnel are cooperating. They don't like it — I think the captain is trying to kill us with the evil eye — but they are cooperating."
"He can glare all he wants. So long as he does what we tell him."
"We have men now in the engineering section, watching the crew there, holding them at gunpoint. And after the captain made his announcement over the intercom, several more crewmen have come out of hiding… including the security people in the aft gun position."
"Excellent."
They'd had to ignore the aft gun, number 3, in the initial attack. Moritomi had taken out number 2, and the men on board the helicopter had killed the gunners at number 1 from the air. That had been a close thing; any one of the rapid-fire cannons mounted on the Sandpiper could have swatted the helicopter from the sky as easily as a mosquito. The assault force had been gambling on the fact that the civilian crew of the plutonium ship would be confused, that even the former military men within the onboard security force would have been unsure of what was happening and hold their fire for that reason. Their delay had made it possible for Ramid's helicopter to get close to the number 1 gun before the ship's defenders had fully realized that the ship was under attack and kill them from the air with machine-gun fire.
"Perform a careful check," Fuchida went on. "There were a total of thirty security guards. We want to be especially certain that they are all accounted for."
"You do not need to tell me my business, Fuchida," Ramid said, his voice crisp. "You are not in command here."
Fuchida started to reply, then thought better of it, turning away. "As you say."
Technically, Ramid was in command of the Pacific Sandpiper assault group. Lines of command had been only lightly and informally sketched in, however, as the operation planning had come together. The Islamist Jihad International — an operational arm of al-Qaeda — and the Kokusaiteki Kakumei Domei had been forced to work together, but despite the pretensions of international revolution, neither organization was fully comfortable with the other. The KKD had needed al-Qaeda for the resources to hit a target as large and as formidable as the Pacific Sandpiper, the Islamists had needed the KKD in order to infiltrate the crew of the Ishikari, destroy the military escort, and create the diversion necessary for the taking of the plutonium ship.
The goals of the two groups, however, remained quite different from each other, and neither fully trusted the other, even yet.
"Then I respectfully suggest, sir," Fuchida said, his voice biting as he replaced the headset over his ears, "that you put the helicopter back in the air. Our next target will be alongside within a few minutes."
Ramid said nothing, but he turned away to comply.
With the Arab's sour attitude, however, Fuchida knew there would be trouble.