"Do what we tell you and they'll be safe," Haqqani said with a shrug. "Allah will keep them safe."
He already has, Ghailiani thought. Allah, and someone named Janet Carroll.
"So… am I ever going to get my computer back?" Jerry Esterhausen asked.
They'd come back up to Deck Nine and the casino earlier that evening, ordering dinner and sitting with the handful of passengers who seemed to have made the Pyramid Club their preferred gathering spot. So far, their terrorist captors had made no move to sequester them or to limit their freedom to move around, save to ban them from a handful of key shipboard areas. The armed intruders went about their work or stood guard in certain spots scattered about the ship and for the most part didn't interfere with the passengers when they went out to get meals or to sit in small groups in places like the casino and talk.
Questions about the safety of people who'd disappeared were ignored or, at best, shunted aside with a curt statement that they were safe so long as the rest of the crew and passengers made no trouble.
And none of the hijackers would reply to questions about how much longer this drama would play out or what was going to happen to the passengers of the ship when they arrived at their unknown destination.
"Just one more moment," she said. Howorth looked around the casino, checking to see if anyone was watching. One tango was standing inside the glass doors leading out to the pool deck, and two more were visible just outside in the spill of light from within the room. No one was paying attention to her or Esterhausen, seated in a booth in an out-of-the-way corner. She opened the latest e-mail from Ghailiani and read it.
Saw picture. Thank you. From bottom of heart thank you. Clicked HTML page. Nothing. Now what? And this one was signed: Ghailiani.
Just wait, she typed back, and then clicked send. The clock on Esterhausen's laptop, which was still set to GMT, read: "10:18 PM." If the mission GCHQ had mentioned in its last e-mail to her was on schedule, they should be seeing some action here within just a few more hours.
There was a sudden commotion at the forward door to the casino. Several passengers — a handful of elderly women and men — had been on the point of leaving, but they were being ordered back into the casino by one of the hijackers. "No! No!" the man shouted. "You stay here, now!"
"What's the meaning of this?" another man demanded.
The hijacker pushed him back with a jab from his rifle. "All of you, stay here now! No move anywhere!"
"What the hell?" Esterhausen asked.
"I think they're getting nervous about us moving around," Howorth told him. "Maybe they're watching our aircraft out there, following us."
"What does it mean?"
"That things are going to start happening damned fast, now."
Howorth set up one final e-mail, this one addressed to GCHQ and the NSA: Ghailiani clicked HTML page. Carrousel in casino, Deck 9, 2218 EST Two tangos outside by Atlas Pool, one inside casino. Ready to receive visitors.
Again she hit send. The message was encrypted using a GCHQ cipher originally created at Fort Meade, so in the unlikely event that someone in Ship's Security was aware of her mail, they weren't reading it.
"Okay, Jerry," Carolyn said, closing the e-mail account and sliding the computer across the table to Esterhausen. "It's all yours."
"What did you do?"
She shrugged. "Nothing much. Called down the wrath of God on the unbelievers, maybe. Just a little."
"I don't understand."
"You will," Carolyn Howorth said. "Just be patient, and you will."
The V-22 Osprey droned through the night, its enormous twin props in the forward flight configuration, driving the aircraft along at just over 270 knots. On the red-lit cargo deck, twenty-four men in combat dress that gave them the look of malevolent beings from another world quietly waited, their rucksacks parked between their booted feet.
"We're approaching the drop zone, Mr. Dean," the cargo master said over the intercom. "Ten more minutes to drop." "Right."
Dean looked aft along the twin lines of black-garbed and masked men seated in the blood-tinted glow of the Osprey's cargo deck. Members of the ultra-secret Black Cat Bravo assault force assigned to the NSA's Deep Black program, they were the National Security Agency's premier military strike team — or would be after tonight. This would be their first operational mission.
Over the past several years of Deep Black's operational history, Desk Three agents had been limited in combat to the firepower they could carry on their person — generally a semiautomatic pistol. The standard wisdom of covert ops held that if you actually needed to use a firearm, your mission had failed.
There were times, however, when something more was needed than a sound-suppressed pistol, a means of delivering major firepower with surgical precision. Various branches of the U. S. military had such units — the Army's Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces, the U. S. Marines' Force Recon, the Navy's SEAL Teams — and Deep Black's Desk Three had worked with all of them, generally through the auspices of USSOCOM, the U. S. Special Operations Command.
But for the past two years Rubens and Charlie Dean both had been pushing for a special-capabilities unit answerable solely to Desk Three. The need had become particularly evident last year, when Dean had undertaken a Desk Three op in the Arctic far north and the takedown of a Russian ship illegally holding American personnel who'd been operating an ice cap weather station. A SEAL assault unit had taken the ship, but difficulties in command control, in communications, and between individual personnel had caused difficulties that Black Cat was designed to prevent.
The Black Cat units, Alpha on the West Coast, Bravo on the East, were the result.
Technically, the team members were, like Dean, civilians — "technically" because although the NSA was subordinate to the U. S. Department of Defense, with either a lieutenant general or a vice admiral as director, the Agency operated in a kind of twilight world straddling both the civilian and the military defense communities.
Of course, the NSA officially didn't even have a field-active component or human intelligence capabilities. Its original charter called for the Agency to handle electronic and signals intelligence — SIGINT — only, which it did by monitoring radio broadcasts, phone and satellite communications, and Internet connections worldwide.
But Desk Three existed because sometimes a human being had to place a listening device in a telephone or an intercept unit inside a computer keyboard to eavesdrop on communications. And sometimes those humans needed a lot of firepower, fast.
Hence, Black Cat.
"Cougars!" Dean called over the team's radio channel. "Switch to tank oh-two!"
The Osprey's cargo deck had already been depressurized, and every man there was breathing pure oxygen through an attachment to 02 lines along the cargo deck's internal fuselage walls. They'd been breathing pure oxygen for the past forty minutes in order to flush all of the nitrogen out of their bloodstreams. Each man now made the switch-over to his own, personal oxygen bottle, throwing a connector switch, then unthreading the aircraft supply line from their oxygen system: At these altitudes there simply wasn't enough oxygen in the air to keep a man aware and conscious for more than a few minutes.
One by one, the men along the starboard side each raised a black-gloved fist with the thumb extended up. The Osprey could carry twenty-four passengeis in two rows of seats, more if they were floor-loaded. Dean and his eleven men were Cougar Team. The twelve men on the port side comprised Jaguar Team and would remain in reserve.