But Khalid still needed to make sure, and there was one way to do that.
Striding to the door leading to the radio room, he snatched up the radio and pressed the transmit key. "Ramid! Ramid, are you there?"
There was a crackle of static. Then, "I hear you, Amir."
"Execute Ya!"
Everything said over the radio was in code or in very carefully phrased speech; the enemy, Khalid knew well, was listening to everything. Ya was the final letter of the standard Arabic alphabet, and as the end of the series it carried the same sense of finality as the Greek omega, the English z. The ending.
"Execute Plan Ya," Abdel Ramid echoed from the Pacific Sandpiper. "Allah be praised!"
Khalid did not reply. Allah, if He existed at all, had thwarted Operation Zarqawi, as He had thwarted so much else.
Allah, if He existed, would have no part of this ending.
David Yancey saw the armed grenade bounce across the flatbed of the truck. If it exploded there, next to tons of explosives and at least one primed and ready blasting cap, sympathetic detonation would cause all of the C-4 in all three trucks to explode. He dived on the grenade instantly, scooping it up and rolling toward the open tailgate, whipping it around in his right hand as he rolled and flinging it as hard and as far as he could, even as he fell off the back of the truck.
He was aiming high, for the far side of that line of refrigerators if he could make it. The grenade exploded in mid-air before it reached them.
The explosion was piercingly loud in the cavernous metal-walled vault of the A Deck hold. Shrapnel rattled off the truck and the bulkheads and something struck his leg and his side as he fell and slammed full-length into the deck.
He lay there for a long moment, panting, rejoicing in the pain because it meant he was still alive.
Up past Kleito's Temple on Deck Ten, Dean led three men spiraling up the service stairwell. It had been all he could do to pull the others from the theater and lead them up here. CJ and the other woman might be killed as soon as their value as hostages was outweighed by the trouble they caused… and knowing CJ, she was capable of plenty of trouble. But Rubens had ordered Dean to play it by the book, and the book said to gain control of the ship's bridge, where the terrorist commander would almost certainly be trying to put together a last-ditch defense of the hijacked vessel.
Dean decided he would have to trust that CJ would take care of herself.
But, damn it, she was a desk jockey, a computer geek, not a trained field agent.
At Deck Eleven, someone with an AK-47 opened fire from above, loosing an entire magazine on full auto down the stairs.
Brisard had brought along Dean's H&K, combat harness, vest, and helmet, and he'd pulled those on over his civilian clothing, giving him an oddly mismatched look with his jeans and tennis shoes. Snapping a fresh mag into his H&K, he loosed a burst up the stairwell. The tango responded with another burst of AK fire, bullets screeching wildly as they ricocheted off steel railings, steps, and bulkheads. Tim Morgan cursed as a fragment off a vailing scratched his face, leaving a thin trail of blood.
"Where are they?" Dean asked Rubens, sheltering under the steps. "And how many?" The bad guys could hold them pinned here all day.
"You have four people in the Security-IT suite, Deck Eleven," Rubens told him. "There are six on Deck Twelve. That's three on the bridge, two in the radio room, and one in the stairwell above you. Five more are outside, on Deck Eleven, further aft."
"Waiting to ambush us between the casino and here," Dean said. "What about the two guys who left the theater?"
"We're tracking them. One is taking the two women down a passageway on Deck Four. He might be looking for a stateroom. The other is going up the Grand Staircase, passing Deck Five now. We're tracking them both." There was a hesitation. "One tango left Security a few minutes ago. You just missed him by a few seconds. He went down the stairwell you're in now. Deck Ten."
Dean tried to hold the described positions in his mind, a three-dimensional map of the enemy's positions. On the one hand, having the Art Room peering into the ship and identifying the locations of each person on board did a lot to lift the age-old fog of war.
On the other hand, it was damned tough to keep track of it all. "What about our people in the hold?"
"The situation there is under control." Rubens sounded stressed as he said it, though, and Dean wondered what he was hiding. "Helicopters are inbound, about ten minutes out. A NEST is on board."
"Okay, then," Rubens said. "Throw the switch."
"Done… "
By injecting the HTML code into the Atlantis Queen's computer system, the Art Room had turned all of the computers in the ship's IT section into zombies — that was what the techies called them — and admin control now rested with the Art Room. Not only did they have control of the security cameras and computer displays, but they also had control over every one of the automated door locks on the ship, all of which normally were programmed from the IT department but which now were being controlled by Rubens' team at Fort Meade.
They'd just locked every key-card door on the ship.
Another burst of gunfire thundered down the stairwell. Dean slapped Henderson on the shoulder. "Hit him with the frag-12s."
Sam Henderson, a former Army Special Forces staff sergeant, nodded and pressed the release catch for the ammo drum on his AA-12 combat shotgun. Dropping the 32-round drum with its normal load-out of 12-gauge shot, he pulled out a smaller, 20-round drum loaded with frag-12 rounds.
The frag-12 had been developed especially for combat shotguns, a 19mm grenade with four tiny, curved stabilizing fins that unfolded as it left the weapon's muzzle. The armor-piercing versions could blast through a half inch of steel plate, and a barrage of the deadly little slugs fired at three hundred rounds per minute created a firestorm of death and devastation.
Henderson chambered the first round. Dean leaned out from under the cover provided by the steps overhead and opened fire with his H&K, spraying wildly to make the gunman overhead duck back. Henderson stepped past Dean, raised his AA-12, and fired a long burst of frag-12s into the upper level. Explosions cracked and banged overhead, and someone screamed as an AK-47 bounced and clattered down the steel steps. Henderson fired another high-explosive burst, and then Dean and the others pounded up the stairs.
The tango lay on the deck in front of a partially wrecked door, covered with blood and trying to pull a pistol from his belt. Dean shot him twice in the head and kept moving.
In the passageway beyond the broken door, a second security door blocked the way Beyond were the radio room and the bridge, and five cornered tangos…
The Advanced SEAL Delivery System, a dry-deck submarine sixty-five feet long and displacing sixty tons, was a relatively new addition to the combat inventory of the U. S. Navy SEAL teams. On board, besides the two submarine officers serving as pilot and navigator, were sixteen Navy SEALs equipped for VBSS operations, the acronym standing for "Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure."
Over an hour before, they'd left the warmth and security of the USS Ohio, a former ballistic missile submarine converted to Navy Special Warfare service, now a transport carrying up to sixty-four SEALs and the ASDS on her afterdeck. The SEALs had climbed a ladder up into the midget sub's spherical air lock and taken their places in the closely fitted seats aft. The Ohio had taken them to a rendezvous point just ahead of the oncoming Pacific Sandpiper and released them.