The meeting was over.
"I need to know I can still trust you," Khalid said.
"I told you… I didn't tell them anything! They… they grabbed me and Rawasdeh so quickly, and then Rawasdeh was knocked down the stairs. I didn't have a gun — "
"Yes, yes, we have been over all of that," Khalid said, placing a fatherly hand on the man's shoulder. "It wasn't your fault."
Ghailiani's right arm was in a sling, heavily bandaged, and he had another bandage wrapped around his torso beneath his open Ship's Security shirt. The ship's doctor had patched him up after Aziz and Nehim had shot him in the woman's stateroom.
It would, Khalid thought, be safest to shoot GhaUiani right now. The problem was that Khalid's personnel assets were stretched to the limit right now. He needed technical people — people who knew computers — in the IT department and in the ship's Security Office.
Things had been tight before with twenty-four Brigade fighters on board each of the two captured vessels, a total of forty-eight. Now Rawasdeh was dead. So was Wahidi, transferred to the Sandpiper on Saturday to work with Bekkali and Moritomi in the special technical unit.
Wahidi's death had been.. horrible, a three-day agony of vomiting and diarrhea as the radiation poisoning he'd received had eaten away his guts. Bekkali was dead as well, the same way, and two other fighters soon would be. The KKD atomic expert, Moritomi, had shot himself when the first radiation poisoning symptoms had set in hours after the transfer of nuclear material to the Atlantis Queen. And two more men had died in the Sandpiper's stern gun position, when the British helicopter had blasted it with a wire-guided missile.
Eight dead so far. Counting himself, then, there were twenty-nine Brigade fighters remaining on board the Atlantis Queen, eighteen on the Pacific Sandpiper. Khalid had expected to take losses, of course; the sacrifice of the special technical unit had been expected, a part of the operational plan.
But Khalid had just five men on board the Atlantis Queen with the training and experience to operate both the ship's computers and the security monitors — and that number included himself. They were working now in staggered eighteen-hour shifts, with one man catching a few hours' sleep at a time. He needed Ghailiani to help fill in, because he'd been trained in the Atlantis Queen's security systems. With some minor changes to the programming of the computer running the ship's security section, Khalid would need fewer men as guards, would be able to control all of the thousands of people on board this ship watching through cameras and the ship's sensors, instead of with armed men standing at specific points like the fantail, the Promenade Deck, and up on Deck Eleven.
With the repulse of the helicopter strike, Khalid was sure that they would have at least a day or two before another attempt was made. According to the colored symbols on the electronic chart table, the enemy ships were keeping well back, none closer than about 250 kilometers.
His big concern now was controlling the ship's thirty-three hundred passengers and crew.
Ghailiani trembled under Khalid's hand.
"Have you seen your e-mail yet today?" Khalid asked, dropping his hand.
The man, his eyes screwed tightly shut, managed a jerky nod.
"Then you know your wife and daughter remain safe. Our original bargain still stands. You help us to the full extent to which you are capable. And your wife and daughter will not be harmed."
"I will do anything you command, Amir. Anything."
"I know you will. And soon this mission will be over, and you will rejoin your family as a very wealthy man. For now, though, I need your help in security. I know this ship has sensors to monitor when people have wandered into areas where they should not go, yes?"
Ghailiani nodded again.
"Good. And I would like you to… extend the list of such places, so that we can know immediately when one of the free passengers wanders into a stairwell, say, or the deck outside."
"I can do that, Amir."
"Good. Do it, then."
A sudden blast of wind struck the bridge windows as Ghailiani departed, followed by a rattle of rain. The weather was turning ugly, the sky turbulent and overcast.
Good. That meant even less likelihood of an enemy attack.
High up next to the ceiling of the ship's bridge, a TV monitor was displaying CNN, via a satellite feed. A woman was talking earnestly into the camera, telling of a rumored deal being struck between the U. S. government and the Atlantis Queen hijackers.
Khalid smiled.
The Americans had fallen all over themselves in transmitting a radio message accepting the IJI Brigade's terms. The promise of $2 billion and the release of several hundred Islamic prisoners… that in itself was a sweet victory, almost victory enough to leave Yusef Khalid believing in a beneficent and all-powerful Allah.
Almost. This victory had been won with daring, imagination, sacrifice, and a great deal of money from al-Qaeda's financial backers in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and elsewhere. It wasn't necessary to drag God into the equation.
Still, knowing that the Americans had capitulated filled Khalid with a surging sense of power, of purpose. A handful of fighters willing to sacrifice themselves in the name of Allah had brought the world's so-called sole superpower to its knees.
It was a shame, really, that he wouldn't be accepting the American offer. He'd given orders to maintain radio silence, to refuse to respond to any signal from the Americans or the British.
Later, when they were closer to New York City, he would begin to negotiate, but only to drag things out and give them the opportunity to take these vessels and their radioactive cargos all the way into the port and cram them up America's ass.
Khalid wasn't interested in money or in freed prisoners.
He was interested solely in revenge.
"Another delay?" Charlie Dean asked.
"I'm afraid so," Rubens' voice replied in his head, speaking over his communications implants. "But this time it's the weather."
Around him stretched the gray recesses of the Eisenhower's hangar deck, a high-ceilinged cavern filled with the crouching forms of aircraft, wings folded, quiescent. The two Black Cat assault teams crouched nearby in front of Lieutenant Richard Taylor, who was drawing with a black marker on a large whiteboard with side-by-side deck schematics of the two ships printed on it.
"Conditions are still decent here," Dean said. He'd just come down from the ship's Met Office.
"But your target is sailing through a squall line right now. They're telling us to expect high winds and unfavorable sea states along the Queen's course for the next twelve hours at least."
And by the time the bad weather had passed, dawn would be approaching. The insertion had to take place at night to have any chance at all of success.
"So we're looking going in at sometime tomorrow night," Dean said.
"Use the time to study those deck plans and photos," Rubens told him. "And we'll be developing our contact with Carrousel."
"Tell her to keep her head down," Dean said.
"Rubens out."
"What the hell is that noise?" Khalid demanded.
Phillips, the ship's captain, stood before him between two armed men. "What noise would that be?"
"You can't have not heard it."
Khalid had ordered Phillips brought to the bridge. Much of the time, he and the other bridge officers were kept confined in a watch room down the passageway behind the bridge. One or another of them could be brought to the bridge any time there was a need for their advice. Khalid didn't like the look in Phillips' eyes, however, and since he and a few trusted Brigade soldiers could handle the ship's wheel, watch the compass, and keep an eye on the electronic chart table and radar, there was no need for the regular ship's officers on the bridge at all.