With a shrill grinding sound, the rear ramp to the Osprey's cargo deck opened, dropping to create a descending ramp leading into darkness.
Dean opened his communications channel again. "We're good to go, people," he said. "Light your strobes." At the back of the helmet of each man in the line, an IR beacon began winking on and off, invisible to the unaided right eye, visible as a white, pulsing flash through the NVG monocular each man wore over his left.
The sudden wind from outside whipped at the legs of Dean's jumpsuit. The oxygen coming through his mask was cold and unbearably dry. More seconds crawled past, and then the cargo master said, "Okay, people! We're coming up on jump point Charlie One in five.. four… three… two… one… now\"
"Go!" Dean yelled. "Go! Go! Go!"
The line of twelve black-clad men moved forward swiftly, passing the line of empty seats to their right, the line of watching comrades still seated on their left. They hit the lowered ramp one close behind the next, launching one after the other into the night.
Dean was the last man out… and then he was falling through the dark.
"This way," Johnny Berger, the steward, whispered. "But be quietl"
Andrew McKay nodded and passed the whisper back to Nina, and she passed it on to the others following. There were twelve of them strung out in a long line, emerging one by one from the door onto the Starboard Boat Deck. Eleven would be taking the lifeboat; the twelfth, Dr. Barnes, was bringing up the rear. He would help them keep a lookout and actually operate the davits that would lower them into the sea.
"Mommy, I'm sleepy," Melissa said.
"Shh, dear. Not now."
Their escape had been put off one time after another. Not long after their secretive meeting up in Kleito's Temple on Tuesday afternoon, the helicopter attack had thundered out of the east. Several of them, including McKay and his family, had seen the helicopter shot down off the starboard side. The escape, which had been planned for that evening, was put off. The hijackers would be on their guard, and it was too dangerous to go wandering around on deck.
There were rumors that a passenger had been shot afterward, but no one in the group had been able to confirm that. They'd agreed, though, that the terrorists might decide to lock all of the passengers up at any time — perhaps put them with Harper and Bernstein and the ship's captain and the Cruise Director and everyone else who seemed to have vanished during the past five days.
But then the wind had picked up and it had started raining. Berger had pointed out that they did not want to try to drop into the sea from a moving ship. The maneuver would be dangerous enough even if the water was calm.
And so they'd put the escape off for another night.
That afternoon, however, the rain had lifted and the wind had died down as the ship had emerged into sunshine from a long line of squalls. Barnes had checked some maps in the ship's library earlier. He'd pointed out that — given their speed and course since Sunday — they ought to be somewhere off the coast of Massachusetts by now, probably less than fifty miles from shore; they could start rowing northeast and hope to strike land within a day or two, even if the military didn't pick up their emergency signal and come get them.
Tonight, they'd all agreed, would be the night.
Turning right, they moved along the safety railing toward the loom of the first lifeboat, hanging just above the deck. Barnes used his security key to swipe through a reader. Everyone else had left their ID cards in their staterooms; if the hijackers were tracking people by the locations of their passkey cards, they likely wouldn't notice the ship's doctor on the boat deck, where they would definitely come investigate twelve passengers and crew out here late at night.
A ready light winked on, and Barnes pressed a button. With a grinding whine, the lifeboat swung across the deck and over the railing.
"Let's get the women and children on first," McKay said, nudging Nina and Melissa forward. He knew it sounded silly — a bit of melodramatic nonsense — even as he said it. But the stress was building inside him to the point where he could hardly stand still. He needed to get them off the ship now…
"Wakkif!" a harsh voice barked from farther aft… and then three flashlights switched on, pinning the party of passengers against the railing. "Stop! Stop where you are!"
"Aw, shit!" Carmichael said. Turning, he started to run forward, but a hijacker with an AK-47 stepped out of the shadows and knocked Carmichael down with a rifle butt to the jaw.
Stunned, the civilians could only stand there, helpless as a half-dozen armed men came toward them both from forward and from aft. A few of the civilians raised their hands.
"Put hands down," one of the hijackers said in heavily accented English. "We know you no have weapons. Now move! That way! You will come with us!"
And the hijackers herded the twelve of them forward along the deck, back toward the door from which they'd just emerged.
They fell to twenty thousand feet before releasing their chutes. With a shock, Dean's parachute opened above him, rapidly slowing his terminal velocity from free fall to a gentle drift through the night.
Grabbing his left and right steering toggles, Dean brought his parafoil into a gentle left turn. His parachute was an MC-4 ram-air military chute, two night-black rectangular canopy sections joined by seven air cells to create a double wing, one just aboye the other. Ram-air chutes had astonishing glide and control characteristics that allowed the parachutist to steer them with extraordinary precision. The red arrow on his forearm display was showing the direction toward the Atlantis Queen and the range… now about four and a half miles.
He could see the other jumpers ahead of him in a ragged and uneven curve, the bright wink of their IR strobes showing their positions in the sky as they slowly began adjusting their positions relative to one another. Vic Walters and David P. Yancey had point and would be going in together; the rest were spacing themselves out so that they would come in one at a time, about five to ten seconds apart.
Dean would come in last.
His rate of descent was steady at fifteen feet per second, his speed twenty-five knots. The wind was light — about five knots from the southwest. The sky had been clear earlier, when they'd left the Eisenhower, but was becoming overcast again swiftly.
With the Queen steaming away from him at twenty knots, it was going to take him some time to catch up with her.
Rubens stood in the Art Room, looking up at the big screen. Deck plans provided by Royal Sky Line had been turned into computer-graphic schematics showing every deck on board the ship, Decks One through Twelve above, Decks A through D below. The sheer size and complexity of the target meant that Neptune was going to have to be carried out in sections. Cougar was only the first wave. Jaguar was in reserve, the Ohio was closing with the Pacific Sandpiper, and the, SAS had just reported that they were ready to go with Operation Harrow Lightning.
But the critical part was getting those first few men down safely onto the Atlantis Queen's deck.
He listened to the chatter from the string of parachutists. There wasn't much. The team had drilled endlessly and didn't need to say much as they lined themselves up for the approach to their target.
"Cougar Two," a voice said, identifying itself. "Slowing descent. Winds picking up a bit. Eight knots."