Kellerman hesitated, his hands above the two throttle levers, one for each of the Sandpiper's screws. His instinct was to throw the ship into reverse, to try to stop the leviathan before it collided with the ship now just five hundred yards ahead.
But with the rudder hard right, with the bow now slowly swinging to the right, toward the other ship's stern, throwing the screws in reverse would actually act against the turn. He remembered reading about some confusion on the bridge when the Titanic had spotted the iceberg, about how an attempt to turn away from the ice had actually swung the bow of the doomed ship toward it.
"That one," Podesta said, pointing at one of the side-by-side levers. "All back! The other one, full ahead!" In the old days, these levers would have been engine telegraphs, telling the crew in the engine room what to do. Nowadays the throttles were handled directly from the bridge-7-a good thing, since Kellerman hadn't yet heard the word from the lieutenant that the engine room was secure.
"Why aren't we turning?" Kellerman asked after a moment. The Atlantis Queen still loomed enormous just ahead.
"You don't turn these things on a dime, Chief," Podesta replied. "Or stop 'em on one, either. What the hell?"
Podesta was standing on tiptoes, looking down at the forward deck immediately ahead of the deckhouse. In the darkness, a half-dozen men were running forward, some clambering into the helicopter parked midway down the deck, others unfastening the lines securing the aircraft to the deck.
"This is Cold Steel Two," Kellerman called. Grabbing his H&K, he jogged for the port side bridge wing. "We have tangos on the forward deck! Looks like they're making for the helo!"
"It'll take 'em an hour to get that thing ready to fly," Vance told him.
As Kellerman left the enclosure of the bridge, he heard the shrill, rising whine of the helicopter's engine, saw the main rotor begin to turn. Two more tangos were running from the deckhouse as others climbed aboard. He shouldered his weapon and began firing. One of the hijackers fell. Another was hauled through the open doorway by a friend already on board.
The bastards had had the aircraft warmed up and ready.
The question was where they would go. The SEAL unit's pre-mission briefing had mentioned the helicopter, pointing out that by now it was probably so low on fuel it would be useless. Land lay forty miles to the north. They might make it… but would find themselves immediately surrounded by the authorities.
What the hell were they trying to do?
"Cold Steel, Cold Steel," Rubens' voice said over Kellerman's radio. "Take that helo down! Now!"
"Yes, sir!" He switched his H&K selector switch to full auto, raised the weapon, and began firing. With the integral suppressor, the H&K made little sound against the rising thunder of the helicopter's main rotor.
Jakowski was joining in from the opposite bridge wing, but the 9mm rounds had little punch to them. With an unsteady lurch, the helicopter lifted from the forward deck, its rotor arc barely clearing the traveling bridge gantry forward.
Kellerman kept firing until his magazine ran dry. He dropped the empty, slapped home a fresh magazine, chambered a round, and began firing again. By now, though, the helicopter was turning away, and Kellerman felt a cold chill of realization.
That helicopter wasn't headed for the mainland.
It was dropping low, low over the black water, nose down and accelerating as it headed straight for the cruise ship ahead.
Yaqub Nehim shoved one of the women hard ahead, sending her sprawling onto the floor as they entered the casino. "Nobody move!" he screamed, holding the other woman close against his chest, the Makarov pressed up against the side of her head.
"Move to the back of the room!" Hijazi added, gesturing with his AK. "Quickly! Quickly!"
The old people did as they were told. "I hope you assholes know you're both going to die," one old woman said.
"And you will die with us, crone," Hijazi said. He strode closer to the crowd. "But if you all do exactly what we tell you, you might live a little longer!"
Nehim was feeling more confident now, more in control. They had twenty hostages here, all of them old people or women. The enemy commandos wouldn't dare attack them now.
And he might yet get out of this.
"Please!" the young woman in his grasp begged, twisting, whimpering. "Please let me go!"
He let her turn around until she was facing him, then squeezed her close with his left arm. To Nehim's eyes, to his culture, the whore was half-naked, her legs bare, the swell of her breasts clearly defined beneath the Western T-shirt she wore.
"No, whore," he told her. He brought his left hand up to grab the long hair at the back of her head, dragging her face closer to his. His right hand, holding the pistol, waved at the darkness beyond the casino's windows. "You and I have the rest of the night to enjoy!"
He tried to kiss her.
Her knee came up hard, a sharp, savage shock squarely into his groin.
Gunfire cracked, two shots. At first, the sagging Nehim thought that Hijazi had opened fire… but as he dropped to his knees he saw that a man had been hiding an AK-47 behind the back of another elderly man just in front of him, that it had been he who'd brought the weapon up and fired two rounds into Hijazi, who was collapsing onto the deck.
Nehim started to raise his pistol, but one of the elderly women nearby whipped her cane up and around and cracked it hard across his wrist, sending the gun flying. An instant later, the cold, black muzzle of a second AK slammed hard against the side of his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a woman who might have been his grandmother beaming at him.
"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker," she told him sweetly. "Arnie Schwarzenegger said that, in True Lies — "
"It was Bruce Willis in Die Hard," another grandmother, the one with the cane, said. "Get your movie quotes straight, Anne."
She picked up the dropped Makarov and smiled at him.
Dean sat with his back against the railing. "You're Ghailiani?"
"Yes, sir," the Ship's Security officer said. He quirked a smile. "Nice trick with the computer virus, and locking all the doors."
"How'd you get out of Security?"
"The others were distracted, trying to figure out what you did. I slipped out, took a gun, and came down to Kleito's Temple before your people locked the doors."
"Why Kleito's Temple?"
He nodded at Khalid's body. "Because I knew that bastard would run if the bridge was threatened. If I went up there myself, I'd never have gotten close to him. But if he ran, if he came down here…" Another shrug. "I just had to wait and see which ladder he came down, port or starboard."
"Your family's okay, by the way," Dean said. "SAS released them yesterday. They weren't hurt."
Ghailiani smiled again. "I saw. It's been… a nightmare."
Motion and a flutter of sound pulled at Dean's eye, and he looked out over the water, toward the south. The sky was growing lighter in the east — the approaching dawn — and the other ship, the Pacific Sandpiper was there in the south surging directly toward them, her bow wake a white mustache against the darkness.
Worse, a helicopter was flying toward them — an Agusta
Westland Super Puma. It had just lifted off the Sandpiper's deck and was accelerating straight toward the Queen.
There were still tangos on the Queen's upper areas, outside on Deck Eleven, the ones who'd been shooting at him a moment ago. Possibly the helicopter was flying to pick them up… or to bring reinforcements for the terrorists from the other ship, but Dean had a feeling that the bad guys had something else, something deadlier, in mind.