He didn't want to die.
Then what are you doing on this ship? The thought was defiant, even angry. You volunteered for this. You wanted to be a martyr… and one of Allah's blessed chosen!
Silver metal began running down the line of the seal, dripping on the deck beneath.
The reality, of course, was more complex than a hunger for the blessings of Paradise. His mother, his brother, and his sister back in Gaza would receive the equivalent of nearly ten thousand American dollars after his death — more money at one time than they could otherwise expect to see in their entire lives.
The first locking bar was cut through. Kneeling, he began cutting the second.
But he'd been expecting his martyr's death to be instant and painless — a single, sharp shock, a bright light… and Paradise would be opened to him. His understanding of radiation, however, was somewhat limited. He thought of it as a kind of poison that would seep from the container and slowly burn him, as if by a slow, roasting fire. Mustafa Abu Sayiq, who'd first recruited him in Gaza months before, had assured him that his death would be clean and mercifully swift. At the time, that has hardly seemed important; he would be providing for his family and striking a heroic blow against the hated West in the name of Allah, the merciful, the powerful.
The second locking bar was cut and Wahidi moved to the third. Cables dangling from the ceiling had been attached to massive eye hooks on the cylinder's end, to pull the heavy lid free when the locks were cut. The ship's traveling crane had been moved and the hatch cover on the forward deck opened, so that the container could be unloaded.
These casks, Wahidi had been told, were strongly built affairs, manufactured to standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Each weighed nearly one hundred tons and was firmly bolted to the deck of the transport ship's hold to keep it from shifting during transit. Each, after its manufacture, was tested by being dropped nine meters onto an unyielding surface, immersed in fifteen meters of water for at least eight hours, and engulfed in flame at eight hundred degrees Celsius for thirty minutes. It was said that these casks could survive even the extreme pressures of the ocean's depths.
Inside those massive containers, the nuclear material was safe from just about anything Wahidi or the others could do to it. If they piled up all of the explosives they'd brought on board the Atlantis Queen and set them off at once, they might fling the cylinder into the air but still fail to breach it.
And so the contents of at least two of these forged steel canisters had to be removed from the layers of protective shielding and transported to the Atlantis Queen. Several forklifts waited on the Sandpiper's deck now to effect the transfer.
The final locking bar was cut through. Wahidi switched off the torch, and he and Bekkali grabbed hold of the handles on the cylinder's end and pulled. With a slow sucking sound, the seal was breached and the metal disk came away.
Wahidi had been expecting fire or lightning bolts or something as evidence of the radiation spilling from the breached container, but he felt… nothing. Nothing at all. He looked at Bekkali again, and the other man shrugged and shook his head. He and Moritomi stood ready with a cargo sling, getting set to begin hauling the cylinders out and up to the ship's forward deck.
The interior of the large canister was dark. Wahidi had also been expecting some sort of magical blue glow.
There was nothing. No light. No fire… no death.
Grinning now with relief, Wahidi began to slide the first of the internal canisters out of the larger container.
Alarms shrilled suddenly on the Sandpiper's bridge. Jamal Hasan, at the ship's wheel, and Abdel Ramid, beside him, both jumped at the sound, but Kozo Fuchida merely smiled.
"Radiation alarm," he said, reaching past Ramid to flick a switch. The shrill ringing stopped. "They have the first cylinder open."
"I didn't realize it would reach us herel" Ramid said. He sounded scared.
"It won't," Fuchida told him. "Or very little will, at any rate. The alarm is connected to sensors inside the ship's hold, to detect radiation leaks there. There actually will be little leakage when they transport the inner canisters across to the cruise ship."
"How much is 'very little'?" the shaken Ramid asked.
"Not enough to harm you. The inner containers are also well shielded against neutron radiation."
"Oh. That is good."
Another alarm shrilled, and Ramid switched it off, the motion almost casual.
Fuchida didn't bother telling Ramid that, in fact, the three of them on the bridge were now receiving a fairly sizeable dose of hard radiation. It wasn't enough to make them sick, not yet. That would come with accumulated exposure over a period of time… in this case, a period of several days or even as much as a week.
And a week from now they would be at their final destination, and nothing would matter to any of them anymore.
Of course the men in the special technical unit — Chujiro Moritomi and the volunteers from among Khalid's Muslims — were already dying.
Nina McKay leaned against the railing of her private balcony, looking down into the night. An overcast sky and night-shrouded ocean surrounded her, but bright work lights on the deck of the smaller freighter immediately below her stateroom cast dazzling pools of light over the other ship's deck and illuminated several men working beside the open maw of one of the large deck cargo hatches.
She had a deeply uneasy feeling about all of this. Those men — many in military uniforms and carrying weapons openly — and the presence of that other ship still tied to the Atlantis Queen's side, plus the sudden, terrifying drama of that jet plane shot down earlier in the day, all of it added up to one thing: something was terribly wrong.
Nina hadn't seen the downing of the aircraft; she, Andrew, and Melissa had been in the mall on the first deck, where the only windows were huge stained-glass panels high up in the gallery's overarching walls. But she'd heard about it from other frightened passengers and from the announcement over the ship's PA. She was still shaken by that nightmare crush, by the pounding fear that Melissa might be trampled in the crowd.
Turning, Nina looked back into the stateroom, lit now by a single night-light. Melissa was asleep on the huge bed with her favorite stuffed animal, a war-weary, much-patched, much-loved gray tiger kitten, cuddled tight against her cheek. When the panic had begun, Andrew had scooped Melissa off the deck with one arm, grabbed Nina's hand with the other, and plowed his way through the press of bodies by sheer brute strength.
Andrew could be… dominating sometimes. He had what she'd laughingly called a white-knight complex, a need to gallop in full tilt, take charge, and fix things whenever there was a problem. It had driven her nuts throughout the eleven years of their marriage and was a large part of why she'd left him, that and his need to always know everything and always be right. She didn't like other people taking charge of her life and telling her what to do, what she needed to do to straighten out her life. It was so much… so much like her mother…
Right now, though, Nina thought she would appreciate some macho counsel, or a bit of well-meaning knight-errantry. Protecting her daughter, keeping her safe, was Nina's single driving need right now, and she had no idea how to do it. She knew something was wrong, but she didn't know what, and with all that black and empty ocean out there, she had no place safe to run.