"Copy."
So far, everything was going perfectly by the book. Rubens was already composing his resignation letter in his head, however. By ordering Neptune to go in without authorization from the President or the Pentagon, he was committing a decidedly illegal act, dropping a dozen armed men onto the deck of a cruise ship belonging to another nation and running the risk that his actions would precipitate disaster. If Khalid decided to blow up either ship out there, radioactive fallout would easily stretch along the prevailing winds three hundred miles across southern Newfoundland, while seaborne contamination might wash across beaches from Newfoundland to Ireland and possibly the rest of western Europe as well. It would be an unprecedented ecological and radiological calamity. That he'd given the order while the U. S. government was supposedly carrying out negotiations with the hijackers, or trying to, would only cast his decision into a sharper, harsher light.
But the alternative was to let the Queen keep coming, with the New England coast now less than six hundred miles away.
It was an alternative that simply didn't bear consideration.
"How about it, Kathy?" he asked the woman seated at a computer console nearby. Kathy Caravaggio was one of his best handlers. "Ready to raise the stakes?"
"We have full admin control,", she told him. "They don't know it yet, but we have control of their security systems now."
"Do it," Rubens said.
"What is wrong with it?" Khalid demanded.
"Amir… I don't know. The security system appears to be running normally, but all of the security cameras have just switched off!"
"That's impossible, unless you shut it down here!"
"I did not, Amir! I swear!"
"Let me see the deck displays."
Hamud Haqqani touched a switch, frowned, then hit it again. "Sir… we don't have those screens, either."
Khalid felt a cold twist in his gut. The deck display screens should have been able to show him points of light for every person on board the ship — red for passengers with ID, blue for people sensed in various areas of the ship without ID, green for the hijackers and the members of the crew. If he couldn't see where the hostages were, he was losing control.
"There was a large group of hostages in the casino, yes?"
"Yes, Amir," Haqqani said. "Last time I looked, there were around fifty passengers and a few crew members there.. Tahir and Faruk are on the deck outside there, and El Hakim is inside the casino."
"Are there other large gatherings of passengers?"
"No, sir. A few in the Kleito Bar… four or five, perhaps. Most passengers are in their staterooms, except for the ones in the theater."
"We may be facing an attack," Khalid said. "Get those screens working!"
They were picking up speed. The maximum forward velocity of a standard ram-air chute is about 25 miles per hour. The team's MC-4s had been modified, however, to improve their speed in horizontal flight. They could manage about 34 miles per hour, now, which meant they were closing on the Atlantis Queen at about 14 miles per hour… or roughly twelve knots. Four and a half regular miles was a little under four nautical miles. Four nautical miles at twelve knots — twenty minutes.
Which meant they were getting damned close by now.
Guided by the GPS-controlled readouts on their wrists, the strike force steadily closed on their target, now less than half a mile ahead. The Queen was running with her lights on and so made a splendid visual target.
"Okay, Cougars One and Two," Dean said over the squad channel. The men were identified by their order in the stick. "You've got the call."
"Cougar One. I see the Atlas Deck. I see two, repeat, two tangos close in by the windows, as expected. AK-47s and cigarettes."
"Cougar Two, roger that. Two tangos in sight."
"Doesn't look like they're expecting us," Cougar One, Vic Walters, added.
One point of HAHO drops was that the parachutes opened so far from the target that the crack of unfolding fabric grabbing air couldn't be heard at the target. Another was the ability to literally fly to the target, within certain fairly broad parameters.
"Cougar One, Two, this is Twelve," Dean said. "Take them down at your discretion."
There was no going back now.
"Inside!" Rashid Abdul Aziz said, nudging one of the Westerners with the muzzle of his AK-47. "Sit down and no make trouble!"
The twelve captives meekly filed through the door and into the theater, escorted by Nejmuddin and Sadeeq, one of them, the black one, still clutching his forehead where Baqr's rifle butt had clipped him.
Stopping in the hallway outside the theater entrance, Aziz pulled out his radio and called the bridge.
"What is it?" Fakhet's voice replied.
"This is Aziz. We've caught them all," Aziz told him. "We're putting them inside the theater now."
"Any trouble?"
"None at all."
"Good. The Amir wants you to — " The voice broke off.
"Bridge? Are you there?"
There was a moment's silence, and then Fakhet's voice sounded from the radio again. "There is a… problem," he said. "Listen. Take all of your men to Deck Nine, then aft to the casino. The Amir wants all of the people gathered there to be rounded up and moved to the theater as well!"
"Why?" Aziz asked. "There must be fifty or sixty — "
"Just do it, Aziz! All of our security cameras have just switched off! The Amir says there may be an attack coming at any moment!"
Victor Jeffery Walters was an old hand. Forty-Height years old, now, he'd joined the Army Special Forces as soon as he'd made sergeant and eight years later had been selected for Delta Force. He'd seen action in both Afghanistan and Iraq, been promoted to staff sergeant, and finally retired after twenty-two years.
His retirement had been illusory, however… or, at best, in name only. An NSA recruiter had approached him last year, and he'd volunteered for paramilitary service with the Deep Black program and Desk Three. Since then, he'd been training with the Cougars, keeping up his weapons skills, keeping up his jump certification.
And now it all was paying off.
Not that this jump was an easy one. He'd done it time after time in training, and his heart still felt like it was trying to climb up out of his throat. He'd once heard a Navy aviator friend talk about the difficulties of landing at night on an aircraft carrier… a huge vessel that during the approach appeared to be about the same size as a postage stamp, and it was moving.
His friend, he thought, had nothing on him. This was a lot worse.
Through the NVG monocular he could clearly see the Atlas Pool and the large deck around it, positioned at the rounded back end of the Atlantis Queen. Light spilling from the casino inside made the deck area as bright as day; he could see the two hijackers clearly. They appeared to be relaxed, weapons slung, the red star of a burning cigarette in the mouth of each.
Thirty feet from the Queen's taffrail, he hauled back on the brake toggles of his parachute, spilling air and speed. As he drifted forward at the uncertain edge of a stall, he pulled his H&K, which he'd released during the jump to hang by its straps from the right side of his body, up to his shoulder.
The touch of a gloved thumb switched on the infrared laser targeting system; through his monocular, he saw the ruby-bright point of light, invisible to the naked eye, dancing across the torso of the terrorist on the right.