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.She recognized her crisis response mechanism and let it take over.In full trauma-surgeon mode, she asked, “Casualties?”“All the ship’s officers are reported dead.”Dead? Her brain froze, trying unsuccessfully to wrap around that one.A ship that size would have—what? Twenty or thirty officers? And they were all dead? She’d seen emergency rooms filled with that many victims.She knew how many family members milled around outside praying for that many loved ones.They had wives, children, parents and a host of others, all of whom would be devastated by this.She tuned back in to what Bud was saying.“—bunch of children are being held hostage.We don’t know much more than that.General Wittenauer said to bring you down with my team for the full sitrep.”The Medusas got to hear the full situation report? General Hal Wittenauer himself wanted them involved? He was the commander of JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command—and was responsible for coordinating the activities of all the Special Forces elements within the armed forces of the United States.He was also the Medusas’boss.They reported directly to him, and through Wittenauer, to the president of the United States.The two men had created the Medusas in an extremely secret executive order last winter.Did the fact that Wittenauer was including them in the situation briefing mean they were definitely going to take part in the response to this hijacking? Her adrenaline level leaped by several more notches.Abruptly, she was wide awake.And the coffee had absolutely nothing to do with it.She eyed the glow of the flightline looming ahead and frowned.“Where exactly is this briefing going to happen?”“Homestead.”“As in Homestead Air Force Base, Miami?” she asked.He nodded.“Interrogators have flown out to the ship that picked up the first people and are talking to them now.They’ll try to piece together what happened for us by the time we get to Florida.There’s a search on for more passengers.So far, three boatloads have been picked up.”Without any more warning than that, she and the rest of the Medusas hustled aboard a Navy P-3, strapped into the uncomfortable web seats lining its cargo compartment and, along with Bud’s SEAL team, winged off into the night with the clothes on their backs, their bellies full of coffee and their heads ringing with questions.Welcome to the big leagues, baby.Michael rubbed his eyes and glanced at his watch: 4:00 a.m.He probably ought to let one of the other guys take the bridge for a while and get some rest.But, truth be told, he hesitated to turn over control of the three women officers to anyone else.He cursed under his breath.He knew better.He couldn’t afford to reveal any weakness that might tip off Viktor.His survival, and potentially the survival of hundreds of innocents, rode on him maintaining his cover and waiting for an opportunity to stop this madness.Michael took a deep breath.Stay cool.Be sharp.He took another swig of coffee and focused on the bank of monitors.The Americans were still clearing the ship.It was tedious but necessary.As they’d expected, the list of men who’d been put off the ship differed slightly from the passenger and crew manifests.Four crew members and two passengers had been unaccounted for.Both passengers had been found quickly, hiding in their rooms—how dumb was that—and eliminated.One of the crewmen had been located and similarly dispatched, but three crewmen were still at large.The team responsible for clearing the ship was doing it right, taking its time and being thorough with a room-by-room, hall-by-hall, cranny-by-cranny search of the vessel.Based on the Americans’ techniques they’d probably been trained by some ex-U.S.Army Special Forces types.He rubbed his hands over the stubble on his cheeks.He’d been in this business too damned long if he could identify the country of origin of a Tango by the search methods the blighter used.He’d been on some wild ops in his day, but this one took the cake.Hands down.One of the women in the next room cried out and he lurched to his feet, battle ready.He raced out low and fast, his MP-5 in front of him.A quick sweep around the bridge.Empty.The three women huddled on the floor in the corner, using their uniform jackets for pillows.Their feet were tied together so they slept in a starburst pattern.They looked like a bad parody of an Esther Williams movie.Johannson was restless but unconscious.She must have cried out in her sleep.No surprise that young Inger was having nightmares tonight.Staring at the sleeping women, he let out his breath slowly.He was wired way too tight for his own good.Or for theirs.The flight took several hours, and this time Aleesha didn’t make the mistake of staying awake once they were airborne.Sleep was a precious commodity in this line of work.The sky was steel-gray, heralding the imminent approach of dawn, when they stepped off the jet in Miami.The air was cool and damp and carried the decaying, briny odor of the ocean.Yup, back in Florida.A van whisked them across the base to the command post.As they were let into the secure facility, she spied General Wittenauer and a team of intelligence analysts, already hard at work on phones and computers in the operations center they’d more or less taken over.No doubt teasing all the information they could out of whatever mysterious intel sources they called upon in a crisis like this.The SEALs and Medusas were ushered through the semi-twilight of the communications room to an attached briefing room that sported soundproof walls and a glass window looking out on the communications center and its teeming activity.They didn’t have to wait long.Wittenauer made one last pass around the outer room to collect a series of note cards.He was still thumbing through them as he stepped into the briefing room and shut the door.Nothing like information hot off the presses.She leaned forward in her seat and noticed that everyone else in the room had, too.The general wasted no time in getting down to brass tacks.“In the last four hours, eight more lifeboats of passengers and three boatloads of crew members from the Grand Adventure have been recovered.That’s about one-third of the passengers and crew.And every last one of them is male.Looks like our hijackers are hanging on to the women and children.”Her stomach sank.Not a good sign.It showed a fair bit of foresight to get rid of the people most likely to mount resistance.She asked tersely, “Where’s the Grand Adventure now?”Wittenauer moved over to a map of the Caribbean tacked to one of the walls and pointed to a red push pin stuck north and slightly west of the Turks and Caicos islands.“Satellite imagery places the ship right here as of about ten minutes ago.Appears to be steaming south.”“Destination?” she asked.“Your guess is as good as mine.South America maybe.Could be any one of the islands within a couple-thousand-mile radius of her current position.The ship was fully fueled yesterday.She can sail for a solid week.”Aleesha did some quick math.Say twenty-five miles per hour, twenty-four hours per day, for seven days—they were talking a range of four thousand miles or more.Ouch.The Grand Adventure could make it to Europe, and that was assuming she didn’t stop and refuel.Many of the small islands in the Caribbean were fully capable of refueling a ship her size.And with a lot of hostages onboard, it wouldn’t be hard for the hijackers to trade a few for a supply of fresh water, food and a load of diesel.Aleesha listened in dismay as General Wittenauer continued [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]