Turning sharply, he opened his mouth to order the small crowd forward to return to their seats and stopped, eyes wide, jaw hanging. Ahead of the ship, two gray jet aircraft appeared to be hovering in mid-air in a very un-airplane like way. They were facing the ships, the air beneath their bellies blurred with the heat of their jet exhausts, seeming to drift backward to keep them just ahead of the Atlantis Queen.
"Good heavens," he said. "What do they want?"
His lecture forgotten, Penrose joined the other passengers at the forward windows.
"What a shot!" Fred Doherty exclaimed.
From the terrace high above the decks of the two ships he and Petrovich had an unparalleled view of the aircraft as they slowly passed up the Atlantis Queen's starboard side, then hovered for a time directly ahead, drifting backward to maintain their relative positions with the ships.
On the Grotto Pool deck below, Harper's exposure had been forgotten as both sunbathers and gawkers ran to the port side railings to watch the show. The two teenagers on the terrace leaned on the railing, pointing, jostling, yelling at each other above the howl of the two jets, and Petrovich had to move back and lean over the railing to get a good angle past them.
What the hell is going on? Doherty thought. Those jets were British, Royal Navy, he was pretty sure. He could see the blue and red roundels just behind their enormous air intakes on the sides, the red, white, and blue roundels on the wings. He'd seen Harrier jump jets before — at an air show demonstration back in the States. The Marine Corps used those aircraft, he remembered; their ability to hover like that had always amazed him.
They were hovering now thirty or forty feet above the water, their vectored jet blasts raising clouds of swirling spray from flat-blasted patches on the sea below them.
Harrier jump jets.
What the fucking hell is going on?
Commander Pryor tried a few more times, then gave up. "King's Palace, Alpha One," he called. "I'm getting no response from either ship."
"Copy that, Alpha One. How about the forward deck of the freighter? Could you effect a landing there?"
He'd already been wondering about that possibility. It seemed impossible that all radios on both ships should be down, and he'd begun entertaining the notion of landing his Harrier, climbing out, walking up to the Sandpiper's bridge, and demanding to know what the bloody hell was going on.
But something was nagging at him. This was more than mechanical failure, and the possibilities were making the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. Besides, that damned helicopter was in the way.
"Ah, negative, King's Palace," he said. "There's a large helicopter parked on the forward deck, off-center toward the port side. Rotor diameter appears to be about fifty feet. The forward deck is about two hundred feet long, but he's taking his chunk out of the middle. There's also a bridge crane across the deck forward. The LZ is too tight."
The Sea Harrier jump jet was a bit under forty-eight feet long, with a wingspan of just over twenty-five feet. With its superb VTOL capabilities, he could have touched down on that deck if the ship had been stationary, but the slight pitch and roll of the vessel coupled with its forward movement through the water made the risk far greater than Pryor was willing to accept. There was also the very real danger of the Harrier's exhaust overturning the helicopter if it caught the other aircraft wrong and possibly starting a fire.
"Very well, Alpha One," the voice of the flight controller said. "RTB."
Return to base. "Roger that, King's Palace. Alpha Flight, RTB. I'll see if I can get a closer look-see on my way out."
He gentled the throttle forward, letting the Sea Harrier drift ahead. His intent was to essentially hover just off the Sandpiper's port side and let the ship pass him only a few yards away. That would give him, and the electronics packed into his reconnaissance pod, an excellent close-up look at the plutonium ship and a chance to see if anything seemed wrong or out of place on board. Spick followed, keeping his aircraft farther out to give Pryor elbow room for the close-in maneuver.
As the ship passed in front of him, Pryor could see people on the bridge, shadowy figures watching him, though he could make out no details. That meant the ship was manned, however; he'd begun wondering if everyone had packed up and moved on board the Atlantis Queen next door. He could also see a large number of the Queen's passengers watching the show from their seaside balconies and open deck spaces above the Sandpiper. It was eerie having all of those people watch him — just like at an air show — but with no radio contact at all.
His attention, however, was suddenly drawn to some damaged areas on the Sandpiper's forward deck, between the helicopter and the crane — stanchions torn up or knocked over along the starboard side and fist-sized dents and rips in the steel deck.
Abdullah Wahidi was shaking, sweat soaking his face beneath his kaffiyeh. The British warplane was less than a hundred feet away, now, and slowly drifting closer. The second aircraft was farther off, too far to see details, but the near one…
He could see the pilot's head, encased in an oxygen mask, helmet, and dark goggles, behind the clear canopy. He had the unnerving feeling that the pilot was staring directly at him.
Abdullah Wahidi had been born in the teeming camps of the Gaza, raised from infancy with an implacable hatred of the Zionists, the Jews, and taught from childhood that it was his sacred duty to die a martyr's death for Allah, the Almighty. For a time, Wahidi had rallied to the Taliban's call, fighting with the international jihadists against the Americans in Afghanistan. He'd trained at a camp in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan, where he'd learned how to operate antiaircraft weapons such as the Russian ZSU-23 and the American shoulder-fired Stinger missile.
He'd never fired anything like this, however, and he grasped the handle gingerly, as though he feared it would bite him. He wanted to run.
The raw emotion, the terror, shamed him. He'd volunteered for this operation, knowing beyond the shadow of any doubt that he would die. He wanted to die. Had he not been given this opportunity to serve Allah, the mighty, the magnificent, he would have died behind the wheel of a truck laden with explosives, detonating the cargo at some embassy, military checkpoint, or other target in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel. Death, a glorious death that meant Paradise for him and money for his family, was what he sought more than anything else in this world.
Why, then, was he so anxious to flee?
The enemy aircraft was drifting closer. It wasn't natural for something that looked like a jet to float like a helicopter, but that was exactly what the machine was doing. His grip tightened slightly, and he moved the barrel of the 30mm cannon, tracking the target.
"Abdullah! Abdullah!" his loader cried. "He's coming closer! He sees us!"
"We are to hold our fire!"
The enemy aircraft began pivoting slowly, until its nose pointed directly at the gun mount, at the same time beginning to rise as the whine from its engine increased to a shrill blast of noise.
"But he sees us! He's going to shoot! In Allah's name, fire! Fire!"
With a dawning sense of horror, Pryor realized what it was that he was seeing. His head snapped around as he looked at the Sandpiper's superstructure. A panel was hanging open just beneath the bridge level, exposing one of the ship's 30mm gun mounts at the corner of the deckhouse. The gun, sixty feet away, now, was aimed directly at him.