"Amir, I don't knowl"
"Ghailiani? You know these systems! What's happened?"
Ghailiani turned in his seat, his eyes locking with Khalid's. "I don't know, either," he said. "All systems appear to be functioning normally, except for the cameras and the security scanners. We could try to reboot. That will take about twenty minutes."
Khalid considered Ghailiani for a second. The man was… calm, icy calm, when everyone else in the Security-IT suite was stressed to the point of near hysteria.
What had the man done?
Probably nothing. Ghailiani was weak and indecisive, paralyzed by the threat to his family. He wouldn't have done anything on his own. His current calm was probably simple fatalism… a numb acceptance that things were out of his control.
But Khalid would definitely ask some more probing questions later, perhaps after having the men at the Millbrook safehouse work on Ghailiani's daughter for a time and send him some more photographs of the process.
"Twenty minutes is too long," Khalid said. "You have five minutes to tell me what is happening to the security systems on this ship."
He turned and left, walking swiftly through the Security Office and out into the Deck Eleven passageway. Through the security doors — he was relieved to see that they, at least, were still working as he swiped his key card — and up the service stairwell beyond. He emerged, seconds later, in the passageway leading to the radio room and the bridge.
"The Americans are continuing their transmissions, Amir," Fakhet told him as he passed the open door to the radio room. "They say they will give us whatever we want, but that we — "
"Ignore them," Khalid snapped. He used his card to go onto the bridge. Three of his men looked at him curiously, Obeidat, Mohawal, and Abdallah. Abdul Mohawal was at the ship's wheel.
"Come hard right!" Khalid ordered. "Steer north!"
"Yes, Amir!"
"Fakhet!"
"Yes, Amir!" the radio operator called from the next compartment.
"Call the Pacific Sandpiper. We need them!"
"At once, Amir!"
It wasn't yet too late.
"This is Eleven. Target is changing course," sounded in Dean's helmet receiver. "Stay with him."
Dean saw the ship turning, but the movement was slow and ponderous. The hijackers were probably hoping to throw off the landings of any more parachutists, but a cruise ship of that size simply couldn't maneuver like a speedboat. Dean watched the silhouette of Gene Podalski, Cougar Eleven, touch down on the brightly lit pool deck now just a few hundred feet ahead. He tugged slightly at the ram-air chute's controls, bleeding off some of his forward speed, and held his breath as the deck swooped up to meet him.
He touched down on the hard wooden planking, taking a few steps to keep his balance, then collapsed the chute behind him. The other Cougar team members crouched on the deck, either forming a defensive perimeter, moving inside, or gathering up their chutes and jump gear.
They'd all made it! Some of the op planners, he'd known, had insisted that it would be impossible to get all of the chutists down safely onto that tiny aft deck of a moving ship. In fact, part of each man's gear included a tightly packaged, inflatable one-man raft, just in case he missed the target and ended up in the sea. It looked like Brisard had managed to fall into one of the aft deck pools, but he was the only one who'd gotten wet.
Dean unsnapped his harness, let his billowing chute, reserve chute, and harness go over the side. As he stepped inside the casino, he saw Carolyn J. Howorth and felt a further surge of relief.
"Hey, CJ," he said, pulling off his oxygen mask, then raising his monocular. "Enjoying your cruise?"
"Charlie!" Her eyes were wide. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Rescuing you," he said. "Unless you insist on doing it yourself."
"Looks like trouble headed their way, sir," Caravaggio said.
Rubens looked at the big screen with its side-by-side schematics of the Atlantis Queen's decks. A tight group of green dots was clustered in the Grand Staircase on Decks Seven and Eight. They appeared to be going up, toward Deck Nine. "Dean?" he said. "Yeah. Copy."
"You've got eight hostiles one deck down, coming up the main staircase. They're moving slow, but you don't have more than a couple of minutes."
"Right."
A drive-by upload, the GCHQ woman had called it. Send an e-mail in HTML format to a target computer. Get someone with access to that e-mail to open it and click on a hypertext line. The result was an influx of code into the target computer — a carefully crafted virus, in fact — that took over that computer and gave the sender administrative control.
In short, the Adantis Queen's security and IT computer network was now being run by the Art Room, almost a thousand miles away. So far as the hijackers were concerned, everything was running normally… or it had been until Rubens had ordered the cameras switched off and the security overwatch display rerouted to the Art Room and switched off on the ship.
It gave Dean and his men a technological edge where they most needed one.
"Keep us posted," Dean said. Swiftly he started peeling off his clothing.
"What the hell are you doing?" Howorth asked.
"Plan A," Dean replied, standing on one foot as he peeled off the jumpsuit. "Walters! You're with me!"
"Got it."
Dean had to sit down to peel off the Polartec long johns. "The rest of you.. police the area and get yourselves and all of your gear behind that bar. And… someone get that guy down off the robot."
Operation Neptune had come in with two possible mission plans, depending on the situation they discovered when they got on board. While they were prepared to launch a general assault — Plan B — with some of them heading down to the cargo hold and the rest heading for the bridge, they were also prepared to carry out the original plan, which had been to infiltrate the ship by posing as passengers. Each of the Black Cat parachutists had a change of civilian clothing — jeans, pullover sweaters, socks, tennis shoes — rolled up inside the rucksack he'd carried secured to his harnesses during their jump.
"They're all on Deck Nine," Rubens' voice said in Dean's head. "Looks like they're sorting things out among themselves."
Dean fastened his jeans and tugged his shoes on — to hell with the socks. As he dressed, he glanced around the casino, looking at the crowd surrounding them, trying to take their measure. A number of them were elderly. Others were younger but scared. There was always the possibility that one or more terrorists had infiltrated themselves among the hostages. In fact, in a normal hostage crisis takedown, the rescue team would be using zip strips to immobilize everybody they found inside, the objective, just in case.
That simply wasn't practical here — or desirable, given that they might need to move these people out quickly. But Dean was alert to the possibility that not all of these civilians were innocents.
He pulled his sweater down over his head, unholstered his pistol, a SIG Sauer P226, screwed the sound suppressor onto the muzzle, and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, tugging the sweater's hem low to hide it. Nearby, Walters did the same.
"Listen up, people!" Dean called. "When they come in here, as far as you know, a bunch of guys in black shot those three, then headed up the steps outside. We'll be watching, in case they try anything, okay?"
The crowd responded with a murmured assent.
"When are you getting us off the ship?" an older man called.