And Eric Phillips was being offered her captaincy.
Apparently, both the Ministry of Trade and Sir Charles Mayhew expected Royal Sky Line to file for bankruptcy. The company had been running close to the wire to begin with, and the company's solicitors were expecting a storm of lawsuits engendered by the hijacking, not to mention the loss of tens of millions of pounds in returned fares. The company, after all, had not made good on its promise of a luxury cruise through the eastern Mediterranean.
And that despite all of the new state-of-the-art security systems.
It would be quite an honor to command the Oasis of the Seas… but Phillips wasn't sure he would accept. During the hijacking, he'd been forced to choose between the safety of his passengers and the safety of those thousands of people down there on Twelfth Avenue. His attempt to ground the Queen and the Sandpiper off Newfoundland had failed, and he'd spent the rest of the voyage locked up in the wardroom area until those commandos — American commandos — had freed him that morning.
Eric Phillips felt… broken.
He wasn't sure he could ever face the responsibility for almost seven thousand souls. Right now, he wanted nothing more than to retire and never go to sea again.
But he also knew that once the sea was in your blood, it never let go. Now was too soon to make anything like a final decision. He needed time..
But he did know that he would not accept his next command as a bribe for his silence.
Andrew, Nina, and Melissa McKay walked down the starboard gangway together, stepping onto the passenger ship pier off of West 48th Street in west Manhattan. It was a brilliant, clear, crisp September afternoon. Seagulls wheeled and shrilled overhead, and the air smelled of mingled salt and big city. In the distance, a roar like heavy surf echoed back from a wall of skyscrapers.
As Nina stepped onto the concrete of the pier, her knees almost gave way. God, it was so good to be home.
"Look, Mommy!" Melissa cried, pointing excitedly to a massive, looming gray shape alongside the pier directly ahead, just beyond a quay converted into a park. The park was filled with cheering, waving people, as was the deck of the ship behind it. "An aircraft carrier! Maybe it's the one that rescued us!"
"No, I don't think so, sweetheart," Andrew replied. "That's the USS Intrepid, and she's a part of a naval museum now. The ships that helped us are still out at sea."
He started pointing out to her two other exhibits at the Intrepid Museum — a submarine tied up at the near side of the Intrepid pier and the bizarrely out-of-place droop-snooted bird shape of a Concord SST, rising on its raft next to the dock.
Nina smiled. By all rights, Melissa should have been somewhere between exhausted and unconscious, but she was showing no signs of running down. Andrew had taken her to the ship's library that morning to look at a book about aircraft carriers when she learned that their black-clad rescuers had flown in off of a British carrier called the Ark Royal
After the dramatic rescue of the passengers and crew of the Atlantis Queen early that morning, there'd been neither time nor inclination for sleep. The three of them had been interviewed by some men in conservative dark suits while the ship was still cruising west past Long Island. Apparently, everyone on board was going through a thorough debriefing before they could go ashore; the McKays and the other passengers who'd been held in the ship's theater had gone through the screening first, so they were among the first to be allowed to leave… thank God.
A polite but very serious gentleman from the U. S. State Department had asked the questions, but the men standing behind him, Nina thought, were from a different government agency. FBI? CIA? There'd also been several armed soldiers present. She wasn't positive, but she was pretty sure that the purpose of the interview was to make sure none of the surviving al-Qaeda terrorists walked off the ship pretending to be legitimate passengers.
Nina watched Andrew take Melissa's hand as they walked across the pier for a closer look at the Intrepid, and wondered — yet again — what the future held for them.
Andrew, Nina thought, had been uncharacteristically subdued since they'd been caught by the terrorists at the lifeboat early that morning. The memory sent a small shudder through her; the small group of passengers had been herded forward at gunpoint, and their captors had argued loudly with one another in Arabic. She'd thought they were trying to decide whether or not to kill the would-be escapees then and there.
Instead, they'd been roughly shoved into the theater with dozens of other captives and told they'd be "dealt with" later.
Nina had watched Andrew struggle with the situation. The man had always been so damnably competent, so frustratingly right about everything… a white knight convinced he could handle any situation, and who always knew the right way to do it. During the hijacking, though, he'd been helpless — they'd all been helpless — and she'd seen that knowledge torture him. He'd wanted to gallop in on his charger and save her and Melissa from the bad guys, and his best attempt to do so had only made things much, much worse, had almost gotten them all killed. It hadn't been his fault, certainly; apparently the terrorists had set the Ship's Security system in such a way to alert them to just such an attempt by the hostages, and there was no way any of them could have known that.
But since their capture Andrew had been taking his helplessness badly.
Trying and failing might even have been good for him.
Nina walked up beside him and took his free hand. "Will you have dinner with us tonight?"
Andrew looked down at her, surprised. "Sure," he said, the word a mumble. "If you want."
"No promises," she said. "But I really do want to talk."
"No promises," he agreed. "But… hell. We've just been given a new chance at life, right? At living?"
"We'll see where it takes us," she told him. And she squeezed his hand.
Andrew McKay felt the squeeze of Nina's hand and squeezed back. He was still sorting through what needed to be done. They'd told them on the ship that hotel rooms were being reserved for all of the liberated passengers off the Queen — and how many tax dollars had that cost? he wondered. Still, it would give him and Nina a chance to talk.
They hadn't done much of that on the Queen. Things had been moving too quickly, too desperately, for that.
Just like the past six months.
A soldier in full combat gear and holding a rifle was standing a few yards down the pier, waving them along, so Andrew tugged gently at Melissa's hand. "We've got to move along, honey," he told her. "Mommy and I are talking about having dinner tonight together. Do you think you'd like that? Or do you want us to go to the hotel and let you sleep?"
"How can I be sleepy, Daddy?" Melissa said. "We're home\ Well… almost. But we're in New York\ And we didn't get to see New York when we flew out to England!"
That seemed to explain everything.
He wondered if he and Nina could make things work. He honestly wasn't sure he wanted to go back. So much had been said, so much had not been said… and so much trust had been lost.
He'd always thought of himself as able to make things work. Everything but his marriage, apparently. And his life. But they had been given a second chance.
And it was certainly worth exploring.
"No, I don't think you understand," Fred Doherty said, angry now. "Do you people have any idea who I am?"