Urged along by her Azipod thrusters and gently nudged by her tugs, the huge ship edged farther out into open water, the gap between ship and shore steadily widening, the bow swinging out to align with the harbor pilot ahead.
And Captain Phillips breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.
The Atlantis Queen was under way at last.
At the very stern of the Atlantis Queen, Yusef Khalid stood with another man and watched the crowded pier slowly recede across the water. "Praise be to Allah," the other man said quietly in Arabic. "He has seen fit to bless us with success!"
"Success for the first steps, at any rate," Khalid replied in English. "We have many steps to go, yet."
"Allah will provide!"
"If you say so," Khalid replied with a shrug.
Khalid had little patience with the hyper-religious posturings of some of his fellow, more passionate jihadists. Passion could be a good thing when it came to war, especially when men were asked to sacrifice their lives to carry out a mission such as this one. And it was useful to pretend a passion for the Divine in order to manipulate credulous people.
But he was not in this for spiritual reasons. Quite the opposite, in fact.
"Your problem," Rashid Abdul Aziz told him, still speaking in Arabic, "is that you have been too long in the World. Your faith in the Almighty and in His Prophet, bless his name, has grown weak!"
"And your problem," Khalid snapped in the same language, "is that you rely too much on God! When you fail, you claim that it must be God's will! It wasn't that you didn't plan enough, or prepare enough, or take the proper precautions, or even that the enemy was too strong, or too smart. No! It must have been God's will! Don't you see that that is the worst kind of blasphemy, that you are blaming God for what has gone wrong?"
Stunned, Aziz shook his heaJ. "You… you are wrong, my brother. All things are in God's hands. Our successes, and our failures as well"
Khalid took a moment to slow his breathing, the pounding of his heart. His own outburst had caught him by surprise. Where had that come from?
"I am… sorry," he told Aziz. It would serve no purpose to berate Aziz for his misplaced faith, or to engage in useless disputation. Let the man believe what he wanted. "I've been under a great strain lately."
And it was true. For months, now, he'd been one of the four team leaders involved in Operation Zarqawi, and the planning, the preparation, had been both intense and exhausting. There'd been a very real possibility that the police would have kept the Atlantis Queen from sailing. Had that happened, his half of the plan would have failed. Operation Zarqawi would have continued — indeed, it could not now possibly be stopped — but the strike against the hated West would be so much more devastating, so much more effective, if the Atlantis Queen could be taken and brought into the unfolding plan.
It had been a close-run thing, but the Queen had sailed despite the murder of the ship's officer, had sailed exactly as he had predicted she would when he'd first laid out his plan for approval in front of the guiding lights of al-Qaeda, in that mountain cavern back in Pakistan's Northwest Territories.
And perhaps Aziz was right. Allah was smiling upon this venture. At least, it would do no harm to allow himself to believe that, to enjoy the warmth that came with the sincere belief that God was with you.
So long as he didn't begin counting on God's blessing. What was it the Westerners said? God helps those who help themselves.
"What was our final count, Rashid?" he asked. "How many did we manage to get on board?"
"Thirty-one, praise Allah!"
"And supplies?"
"Three trucks, Amir." The honorific meant "Commander." "A total of twelve tons of explosives, as well as rifles, ammunition, detonators, hand grenades. And the special weapons. Everything we need!"
"It is good. Remind them to stay out of sight. This ship has security cameras everywhere. We don't want anyone to show himself and give our presence away too soon."
"It will be as you say, Amir."
"Our man in the security office should have passkeys for everyone before tomorrow." He pointed forward with a twitch of his head. "Go, now. Tell them to stay out of sight."
"Yes, Amir Yusef!"
Khalid pulled out his phone with its encrypted satellite link.
It was time to begin coordinating events with the Pacific Sandpiper.
West of Saint David's Head and the coast of Wales, the leviathan plowed forward into rolling seas and a stiff breeze. The blue-and-white-painted PNTL transport had a top speed of eighteen knots, but since leaving Barrow some two hundred nautical miles astern she'd been plodding along at a mere eight, a concession to safety regulations. Sea traffic was heavy within the confined waters between England and Ireland and the chances of a collision markedly higher. The Pacific Sandpiper's stringent insurance contracts required that she move slowly enough within congested waters that even rowboats could avoid her, or so it seemed. She would be required to crawl during her approach to the Panama Canal, and when she entered Japanese waters as well.
High on the ship's spacious bridge, her captain, Neil Jorgenson, stood next to the helm and studied the waters ahead. Their escort, the Ishikari, led the way nearly half a mile off the bow, a narrow gray silhouette rolling alarmingly from side to side in the heavy swell. To starboard rode their second escort, the Royal Navy frigate Campbeltown. The Campbeltown's Sea King helicopter was a speck in the distance to the southwest, scouting ahead for trouble.
"Looks like the Japs'll be feeding the fishes this morning, Captain," the first officer, Roger Dunsmore, said, grinning as he lowered a pair of binoculars.
Jorgenson had been a sailor for nearly all of his fifty-two years, starting out as a boy on the family fishing boat in Norway. His parents had immigrated to Great Britain in the early 1970s, and his very first adult job had been as deckhand on board a British Petroleum supply ship in the North Sea. Compared to that, a bit of roll like this was nothing.
"That's what you get when you go to sea in a cockleshell," Jorgenson replied with a shrug. He fished inside the pocket of his jacket, extracting a battered pipe and a tobacco pouch. There were regulations against smoking on board — there were regulations for everything on PNTL vessels — but at sea he was the master. He began filling the pipe. "I imagine they envy us our rock-solid little island now!"
The Sandpiper was superbly stable, ignoring the swell, which broke to either side of the ship's high, rounded bow with scarcely any lift or roll at all. Even in a full gale, being on board the Piper was more like standing on an oil platform anchored to the bottom than being on board a ship. She was an aircraft carrier to IshikarVs canoe, a most comfortable and pleasantly civilized way of going to sea.
"Speaking of Japs, sir," Dunsmore said, "have you seen ours?"
"Wanibuchi and Kitagawa? Not since we left Barrow," Jorgenson replied. "Why?"
"Not sure. They were giving me the creeps when we were taking on our cargo, always underfoot, always watching everything we do."
"It's their plutonium," Jorgenson replied mildly. "They have every right to keep a close eye on it."
"I suppose so, sir. But I swear they crawled through every cubic meter of this ship. Looking at everything. Taking notes. Checking security, measures. Asking questions. Jabbering away at one another like nobody's business."
"It is nobody's business, Number One. They were cleared by the head office. That should be enough for us."