"Do you know where they're keeping them?" Howorth asked.
Ghailiani shook his head. "No. But they've been e-mailing me… pictures. To show me they're still alive. And to… to remind me." He closed his eyes, his face screwing tight with rising panic. "Oh, God! I'll never see them again!"
"You will, Mohamed," Howorth told him. "We can help you! But you'll have to help us."
"When they know I've helped you," he said, pain etching his voice raw, "when they know I've talked to you, they'll — " He broke off, sobbing again.
"This is useless," Mitchell said.
"No," Howorth told him. "This may be the one big break we need. You know they're going to be putting together some kind of rescue op. Mohamed, here, will be able to give us all the intel we need. We just have to show him we can help his family."
"They… they're going to kill them," Ghailiani said, miserable. "They're going to kill them"
"Not if we have anything to say about it," Howorth told him. "We need to get to my stateroom and get my computer. And we'll need your e-mail account information, Mohamed. Address and password. Can you do that for us?"
Slowly, Ghailiani nodded.
"I think we'd better get out of here anyway," Mitchell said. "They'll be tracking this guy and his buddy. And us."
"Too right." Together, they helped Ghailiani stand and move toward the door.
Dr. Barnes sat down at the console in the back of the infirmary and switched on the power. Slipping the headphones on over his ears, he dialed up the volume slightly, listening to the hiss and crackle of ionospheric static.
The shortwave radio had been installed in the cruise ship's infirmary as a lifesaving measure, a means for the medical personnel to communicate directly with a hospital ashore in medical emergencies without having to run all the way up to Deck Twelve and the radio shack aft of the bridge.
He'd first tried using his cell phone, of course. The Atlantis Queen's onboard cell network connected via satellite to shore networks, enabling passengers to make calls and connect with the Internet. However, when he tried to make a connection, all he got was a recorded voice telling him the system was temporarily unavailable. That, he reasoned, would have been one of the first things hijackers would do — shut down the phone network so that the hostages on the ship couldn't call out.
But, just possibly, the hijackers didn't know about the infirmary shortwave.
"This is Delta Charlie Sierra One-one-three Echo," he said. "To any station hearing this call. Mayday, mayday, mayday.. "
The danger, of course, was that they might monitor the call from the radio shack. But it would take them time to get down here, or to disable the antenna on the radio mast.
"To any station hearing this call, mayday, mayday, mayday…"
"Where are they going?" Khalid demanded.
"It's hard to tell," Haqqani replied, studying the liner's deck schematic. "They were on Deck Eight, but they're going down, now." He pointed. "This stairwell." "Who do we have near there?" "No one, sir. It's… it's a big ship." Khalid scowled. That had been the problem from the beginning. With only thirty-one men on the Atlantis Queen, plus the fifteen or so he might be able to borrow from the Pacific Sandpiper at any given time, his personnel assets were sharply limited. There were so many places on board where he had to have people at all times — the bridge, engineering, watching the prisoners in the theater, the aft hold on A Deck, the fantail, the Deck Eleven Terrace. Most of the men had been awake for thirty hours straight at this point, and he needed to let them start rotating shifts to get some sleep.
But the two he'd sent aft to deal with the intruders on Deck Eleven had run into trouble. They should have returned almost immediately with two prisoners or word that the intruders had been dealt with… but according to the monitor, they were moving down and aft through the ship. Deck Six, apparently.
"Call up the records on the Carroll woman," he said.
Haqqani did so.
"Her stateroom is Six-oh-nine-one," Khalid said, reading the entry. His eyes narrowed. "Another SOCA agent, no less. Show me Mitchell's records." He scanned through those as well. "He's on Deck Four — Four-oh-seven-two. Obviously they're working together, however."
"We have six men on the Deck Twelve Terrace, sir," Haqqani pointed out. "We could send some of them down to deal with these two."
"No. I need them where they are." He was not going to allow these… these rats in the walls to sidetrack the plan or divert his people from their mission.
"Amir Khalid!" a voice called from the Security Office intercom speaker. "Sir, are you there?"
"I am here, Fakhet," Khalid replied. "What is it?"
"Sir, someone is transmitting from inside the ship!"
"How? The satellite phone network has been disabled!"
"This is shortwave radio," Abdul Agami Fakhet replied from the radio room, one deck above. "It's coming over the scanner."
"Let me hear."
Khalid heard a rustle, and a burst of static as Fakhet turned up the gain on the radio scanner. "To any station hearing this call," a voice said, crisp and close. "Mayday, mayday, mayday…"
"Can you tell where the call is coming from?"
"No, sir. Somewhere on board."
Khalid thought it through. Passengers wouldn't have shortwave radios. It had to be a crew member somewhere, perhaps down in engineering. A Deck or below, certainly.
In fact, it scarcely mattered. He'd hoped that the implementation of the next phase of Operation Zarqawi might be put off a little longer, but everyone in the IJI command group had acknowledged that the assault team would have to come out into the open sooner rather than later… perhaps as early as today, certainly by tomorrow.
But another rat in the walls. With so few men to call upon, Khalid felt as though he were engaged in a colossal juggling act, trying to keep a dozen balls in the air at once.
And the first of those balls were starting to fall.
"Fakhet!" he said. "You were a radio operator in Afghanistan." He and two others had been picked for this operation because of their technical experience, so that they could man the ship's radio room.
"Yes, Amir."
"You know what shortwave sets look like. What the antennae look like."
"Yes, Amir!"
"Take Obeidat up to the ship's mast. Use the ladder and deck hatch behind the radio shack. See if you can find the shortwave antenna and cut it or pull it down."
"It will be done, Amir!"
This particular rat wouldn't be able to reveal too much to the world outside that hadn't already been guessed, but it was time to move to the next phase. In any combat, a critical aspect of battle management was the pacing, the ability to keep moving and to always stay one step ahead of one's opponent.
Khalid returned his attention to the ship's schematic. According to the data carried by the small moving red dots, both Ghailiani and Rawasdeh were traveling with Mitchell and Carroll. The four of them emerged from the stairwell onto Deck Six, now.
The most likely reason for this was that Ghailiani and Rawasdeh were dead, and the two SOCA agents had taken their ID cards with them. Like Khalid himself, Rawasdeh was a veteran of both Afghanistan and Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, the branch of al-Qaeda fighting in Iraq. He would never surrender, never betray the Cause.
Ghailiani, however, was an unknown quantity. The Ship's Security officer had been kept in line so far by threatening his wife and child — the operatives holding them e-mailed a new photograph to his account each day, proving his wife and daughter were still alive but still very much at their captors' mercy. But it was possible that Ghailiani had broken completely; for several days, now, the Moroccan had been showing the enormous stress he'd been working under, the staggering load of fear. Had he been pushed too hard? Had he elected to help the two British agents?