"This is our position," Phillips told him, pointing to the end of a yellow line stretching southwest into the North Atlantic. "About forty-seven degrees north, about eleven degrees west."
"I see. And how far are we from New York?"
Phillips looked startled. "New York? New York City?"
"Yes."
The ship's captain appeared to wrestle with this information for a moment, then used a stylus to touch the ship's current position and dragged it across the plastic surface of the map. The software automatically zoomed out until the curvature of the Earth came into view on the screen, showing the coastlines of Europe as far as Greece and Scandanavia, much of northwestern Africa, and, to the west, half of Canada and the United States, as well as much of the Caribbean.
As Phillips dragged the stylus, a yellow line extended with it, connecting the Queen's current position with Manhattan. The line bowed slightly, following the Great Circle, passing just to the south of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, then down past Cape Cod and Long Island.
"How far?" Khalid asked as Phillips straightened up.
Phillips tapped a menu box, and the answer appeared on the navigation screen. "About twenty-seven hundred nautical miles," he said.
"And how long will that take?"
"At fifteen knots?" He tapped out the calculation on the display and read the result. "One hundred eighty hours," he said. "That's about seven and a half days."
"A week. And how much faster could we get there if we increased our speed?"
"Increased it by how much?"
"The Pacific Sandpiper seems to be riding alongside quite well," Khalid said. "I propose we increase speed to, say, twenty knots."
"I don't know if we can manage that."
"I understand. But if we could?"
Phillips tapped out another calculation. "Five-point-six days. Say.. five days, fifteen hours."
Khalid's mouth worked silently for a moment. "So, at twenty knots, we could reach New York by next Friday, sometime in the afternoon?"
"Yes. But I can't recommend that."
"Why not?"
"I can't predict the stress on this vessel caused by dragging that freighter. And it will take a lot more fuel to move that much weight, at that much higher a speed."
"Would you have enough fuel to make it?"
Again Phillips worked out the calculation. "Yes." He said the word reluctantly. "Barely, but yes."
"Then that is what we will do," Khalid told him. "Give the order, please, to come to this new course."
"Helm," Phillips said, his sense of dread growing swiftly deeper. "Come to new heading… two-six-zero, please."
"Coming to new heading two-six-zero, Captain. Aye, aye."
The helmsman put the wheel over, and the liner slowly began to edge onto her new course.
After several moments, the helmsman announced, "We're on new course two-six-zero, sir."
"Increase speed… slowly… to two-zero knots."
"Coming to two-zero knots, slowly, Captain. Aye, aye."
God, what did this man want with them, steering a course for New York City?
The Pacific Sandpiper was carrying radioactive nuclear material. The men who'd captured both vessels were obviously Islamic fanatics.
The only conclusion Phillips could imagine was that these men intended an attack against New York City, a nuclear attack, an attack that would make the horror of 9/11 pale by comparison.
And Captain Phillips realized now that he might well have to choose between trying to save his crew and passengers.. and saving New York City.
Chapter 17
Kozo Fuchida sat next to Moritomi's bunk. "There are doctors on the other ship," he said earnestly. "They might be able to help."
"There is a doctor on this ship," Moritomi replied. "Believe me, my friend. There is nothing any of them can do."
Chujiro Moritomi had begun showing signs of radiation poisoning only hours after the radioactive canisters had been transferred to the passenger ship. His face was flushed; the skin of his hands and arms was red and shiny, as though he'd received a bad sunburn. During the night he'd started vomiting. Fuchida didn't understand the science of it. That had been Moritomi's area of expertise, since he'd worked for several years at the Rokkasho nuclear plant. "I thought you had to breathe the powder to be hurt by it," Fuchida said.
The principal danger inherent in those metal tubes of plutonium oxides, Fuchida had been told, came with breathing the stuff, which had been described as the most toxic material known to man. Conventional high explosives would throw a cloud of dust into the air above Manhattan, and prevailing winds would carry the stuff in a deadly footprint up the New England coast.
But apparently those cylinders were leaking fairly high levels of gamma radiation as well, radiation enough to cook any unprotected individual who handled them.
"We weren't told.. everything," Moritomi said. "The Arabs were terrified. They thought the radiation would kill them right away." He started coughing, and a smear of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. "They're going to wish it had been right away."
"Khalid lied to us?"
"He may simply not have known what to expect. Or perhaps some of those cylinders hold something more concentrated, more deadly, than simple MOX powder, and our intelligence wasn't good enough." He shrugged. "None of it matters now, of course."
Fuchida's gaze slipped to the small table beside Moritomi's bunk, which was empty except for the compact deadliness of a Walther P5 pistol. "Of course."
"Our omi," the sick man said, "remains."
Fuchida nodded. He touched Moritomi's shoulder. "I'll be back to check on you after a while."
Moritomi didn't answer, and Fuchida wondered if he'd fallen asleep. Fuchida let himself out of the cabin, one of the single berthing compartments for the ship's officers, quietly.
But as he was walking away down the passageway, he heard a single loud, sharp shot from the room.
Captain Phillips and helmsman Jason Miller walked back onto the bridge, escorted by the terrorist Khalid had called Aziz. Phillips felt dirty and tired; he'd gotten little sleep the night before.
Since the takeover of his bridge almost twenty-four hours earlier, Miller, Phillips, and four others of his regular bridge crew personnel had been kept imprisoned in the officer's wardroom aft of the bridge. An adjoining bunkroom used by duty officers served for sleeping and hygienic considerations, and members of the ship's catering staff brought meals — under guard — up from the forward galley.
Staff Captain Vandergrift, four more bridge officers, eight security and ship's computer personnel, and two surviving radio operators had all… vanished. Khalid had ordered them taken away at gunpoint, and, so far, Phillips had been unable to learn what had become of them.
As the hours passed, their safety weighed more and more heavily in his thoughts.
Apparently, the hijackers were determined to keep the bulk of the ship's passengers and crew in the dark concerning what had happened. The armed guards wore military-style uniforms, and a few were wearing shipboard security uniforms. Khalid or one of his men made occasional intercom announcements from the bridge or radio room, announcements crafted to convince the floating city of the Queen that all was well, that the Atlantis Queen was rendering assistance to a vessel in distress, that the ship soon would be back on her regular course.
"Good morning, Captain," Khalid said as Phillips was led onto the bridge. He was standing next to the electronic chart table. "And it is a good morning, I assure you."