On the flight deck he met Noora and Ali. They were surrounded by armed men and had Jarvis between them. More men lay in a circle around the helicopters, their weapons at the ready. The engines of the helicopters were still and the rotors stationary.
Qazi set off diagonally up the flight deck, heading for the catwalk forward of Elevator One. Behind him Ali and Noora shepherded Jarvis along. Immediately behind Jarvis was a man carrying one of the trigger devices. It weighed about forty pounds and was slung across his back on straps. Qazi kept the admiral’s arm firmly in his grasp. Youssef, the Palestinian leader, carried two backpacks over his shoulders. Two gunmen preceded the party and two followed. Two more were out on each side. “Faster,” Qazi told the men in front, and they picked up the pace.
24
The power was off in the forward mess deck. Emergency battle lanterns provided the only illumination. The unarmed sailors who packed the place gaped when they realized that the officer in whites with tape over his mouth and wrists handcuffed together was Admiral Parker. Ali and his troops pointed their weapons and gestured. The sailors hastily retreated through the watertight hatches into the passageways beyond with many backward glances at Admiral Parker, who watched them go impassively. Qazi’s men dogged the hatches shut again behind the last Americans.
The entrance to the forward magazine was a hatch leading downward. It was marked with a warning in red: “Unauthorized Personnel, Keep Out. This Means YOU.” Everyone donned gas masks: Noora helped Jarvis with his, and Qazi placed one on Admiral Parker and ensured it was properly positioned on his face and functioning correctly. Then Ali and his men opened the dogs on the magazine hatch and lifted it to the open position.
The first man through the magazine hatch found the compartment below empty. It was merely a security access area. A large vault door stood at the end of the compartment with a television camera immediately above it. The gunman put a pistol bullet through the camera and the red light just below the lens went out. He could hear the muffled sound of an alarm. He quickly set a shaped charge on the door, then stood to one side and detonated it. Within seconds his companion, Youssef, slipped a hose attached to a metal canister through the small hole in the door punched by the explosive and opened the valve on the canister. As the gas hissed through the hole the first man methodically set plastique charges on the vault door. When he had the fuses set, he scrambled away up the ladder. Youssef secured the valve on the canister, pulled the hose from the hole, and scurried after his companion.
The explosion jolted the mess deck. Down the ladder the two men went again.
The access compartment was in total darkness. Shattered glass from the fluorescent tubes in the overhead and the emergency battle lanterns lay on the deck. The security door was off its hinges and badly warped. Smoke eddied uncertainly. The two men pulled the door free and groped their way into the next compartment.
One of the three marines in the compartment was still conscious, so the intruders shot him. They ignored the others. The gas would keep its victims out cold for several hours. Qazi had insisted on the use of nonlethal gas; not because of any concern for the victims, but just in case one of his key people had a defective mask.
Another hinged watertight door stood against the forward bulkhead of this compartment. It had no locks, but opening the door would be fatal if there were armed marines on the other side. The two gunmen set another shaped charge and backed away. It exploded with a metallic thud.
Youssef approached the hole with his canister. He never got there. A marine on the other side of the door put his rifle against the hole and opened fire. The M-16 slugs spanged against the canister and tore into Youssef’s arm and ripped his throat apart.
The demolition man huddled against the door. He pulled his backpack off and began packing the dogs with plastique, working in the darkness without his flashlight entirely by feel. Bullets sprayed periodically through the one-inch hole blown by the shaped charge as the muzzle flashes strobed the smokefilled atmosphere. The demolition man cringed under the lashings of the thunderous reports of the M-16, magnified to soulnumbing intensity in this enclosed steel box. Between rifle bursts he could hear an alarm ringing continuously.
In the compartment on the other side of the door, the senior of the three young marines there was trying desperately to inform someone of their plight. The overpressure from the shaped charge that blasted a hole in the door had practically deafened them. Still, the sergeant could hear well enough to learn that the phones and intercom box on the wall were dead. He had already triggered the alarm, which also rang in Central Control, in the main engineering station, and on the bridge. One man was vomiting; he already had too much of the gas. The man at the door changed the magazine in his rifle and sent another burst through the hole. The rifle sounded to him as if it were being fired in a vacuum.
The senior marine was Sergeant Bo Albright from Decatur, Georgia. He groped through the silent, choking darkness for the bulkhead-mounted controls which would flood the magazines. He found them and pulled the safety pin from the lever that energized the system. He pulled the lever down. A row of green lights illuminated above a series of six buttons. He jabbed the first two buttons and held them. In three seconds the lights turned from green to red. He pushed the buttons in succession until all the lights were red.
In the compartment two decks below his feet that ran the width of the ship, the actual magazines, water rushed in from the sea.
“Get away from the door,” Albright screamed into the ear of the rifleman. Together they pushed a desk away from the wall and crouched behind it with their rifles. They were as far away from the door as they could get. Albright stuck his fingers in his ears, scrunched his eyes shut, and opened his mouth. He waited.
The plastique around the door detonated. The concussion jolted them with the wallop of a baseball bat.
Albright peered through the darkness, blinking rapidly, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. They would be coming!
Lights through the gap where the door had been! He triggered a burst. Another. Something was thudding into the desk. He fired again.
He was falling. Slowly, languidly, drifting and falling. The gas! He squeezed the trigger on the rifle and held it down as he went over the edge and tumbled into a black, alien vastness.
“Wake up, Ski. Wake up.” The sailor shook the catapult captain vigorously. “Goddammit Ski, wake up!”
Aviation Boatswains Mate (Equipment) Second-Class Eugene Kowalski groaned and opened one eye. “Okay, asshole, I’m awake. We’d better be fucking sinking or …”
“We’re at GQ, Ski. A bunch of terrorists have landed on the flight deck. No shit.”
Kowalski groaned again and sat up. He was on the floor of the waist catapult control station, still in civilian clothes. No doubt someone had carried him here to sleep it off when he came back to the ship drunk. That was what usually happened. He had awakened here on the floor of the waist bubble before — several times, in fact. “Terrorists, huh?”
“Fucking A. And the captain and the admiral are hostages on the bridge and there’s a big fire in the hangar and one in the comm spaces.” He drew a breath. “And three choppers full of terrorists landed on the flight deck a little bit ago.”
“Cut me some fucking slack, Pak. You idiots didn’t let me sleep through all of that.”
“What could you have done? And this is your GQ station, so when they called it away you were right here. We’d have woke you up for a launch.” His voice was so sincere that Kowalski eyed the Korean. Maybe he was telling the truth.