John Carr. James Deegan
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it was far more likely that this was a false alarm, linked to whatever had caused the engines to shut down, than that there was an actual fire.
But still.
He knew that the ship’s duty fire control party would have received the alarm on their personal radios, but he called the head of the party anyway and made sure he was en route.
He had a quick look at the fire suppression system – it was showing deployed, which meant a fine drizzle was already descending in the compartment; if it was not cancelled it would be followed shortly by a mixture of argon, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.
Still not overly troubled – this was an automatic response to an alarm, false or otherwise – he keyed in the command to close the fire doors in that zone of the ship, before glancing up at the overhead CCTV panel.
It was divided up into many dozens of small images; he called up a new screen showing the six views of the engine room.
All were blank.
He grunted in surprise.
Okay, now that was concerning.
He immediately put an intercom call out to the men down there.
No reply.
Tried first engineer Phil Clarke on his personal radio, with the same result.
Well, Houston, he thought to himself, perhaps we do have a problem.
He checked the ambient temperature sensors – they were elevated.
He clicked his own radio again.
‘Captain to the bridge, please,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’
Then he called the second deck officer, whom he knew was in his cabin not far from the engines.
The man picked up quickly.
‘Jerry, it’s Nils,’ said the staff captain. ‘Can you do me a favour? The engines have gone offline, there’s a fire alarm down there, and I can’t raise Phil Clarke or anyone else. Fire control are on their way, but would you mind just going along and telling me what’s going on?’
‘Sure,’ said Jerry.
The staff captain ran through some checks on his bridge systems, and then made another attempt to contact the engine room on the comms.
Same result.
His radio crackled.
It was Jerry.
‘Nils,’ he said, ‘it’s me. It’s… it’s a bit weird down here. I can definitely smell burning, but the door’s locked somehow. And one of the junior engineers reckons he heard a loud bang from inside about a minute ago.’
‘Shit. Are fire control there?’
‘Yes, we’re forcing it. We’ll be inside in thirty seconds.’
‘Okay,’ said Nils. ‘Keep me in the loop. I’ll need to know whether it’s a general evacuation situation in…’ He looked at his watch. ‘In one minute. If I don’t hear from you, I’m calling it.’
‘Roger that. We’re nearly through.’
FAR ABOVE, CAPTAIN Carlo Abandonato had known that the engines had stopped – he’d felt the slight change in vibration, and had seen the momentary dimming of the lights – but he was not terribly concerned.
They were not scheduled to shut down, but things cropped up now and then.
He assumed that Phil Clarke and his team had noticed something – almost certainly nothing major, the damned things had under 6,000 hours in them since a complete rebuild – and had taken them off for a short while to sort it out.
Clarke had done twenty-two years in destroyers in the British navy, and was fresh from a three-day manufacturer’s refresher course at Rolls-Royce Marine; it couldn’t be anything that he couldn’t fix.
Still, Abandonato had been keen to get back up to the bridge, and his unease had doubled or trebled with the radio message from the staff captain.
So now – careful to look smooth and unflustered – he took his leave of the tables full of family diners and walked out of the burger restaurant.
It was as he was starting upwards in the elevator that he heard the first shots.
And then the human sounds of fear and horror.
Outside, unseen by the captain, the Yemeni security guard, called by Argun Shishani from the yacht along the coast at Marbella, was standing on the sun deck with an AK47, taking aimed shots at the sunbathers and swimmers in and around the pool.
Several people were already floating in red-tinted water, and others were scrambling to get away.
The Yemeni had been chosen for this operation precisely because he was battle-hardened; he had cut his teeth on the US Marines in the Second Battle of Fallujah, during the insurgency in Iraq, and had travelled the Middle East and Africa throughout the years that followed, fighting the kuffar in the name of Allah.
He’d spent most of the recent past fighting the Pesh and the al-Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq, and the YPG and others in Syria.
He was remorseless and dedicated: he accepted that death would embrace him today, and he welcomed the fact.
He thought of his friends, men who had gone before him and died in the same glorious cause, and he smiled.
This was for them: he would see them soon.
He had ten magazines of thirty rounds each on his chest rig, and he intended to make as many of those rounds count as possible.
He took aim at a young child, standing by a gangplank on the deck below, screaming in frozen fear next to its dead mother, and heard the click as the hammer of his weapon struck an empty chamber.
His magazine empty, he allowed it to hang free on its sling, and took a grenade – a Swiss-manufactured L109A1, liberated from a British Army stores in Germany, on a four-second fuse – from his bag.
Leaned against the guard rail.
Pulled the pin.
Almost casually, he threw the grenade over the side at the child, and the panicking stream of humanity – if you could use that term to describe the dogs who were running like cowards down the nearest gangplank.
The grenade detonated with a dull crump, killing the child and two others outright and wounding many more.
Smiling, he reloaded the AK, fired a dozen rounds into the survivors and then turned and walked in the direction of the cabins in search of more victims.
It was a good day to die, here in the land of the infidel, bringing terror to the enemy, and his womenfolk, and his young.
BY NOW, CARLO Abandonato had reached the bridge deck, his blood running alternately cold and hot.
He found the bridge empty, the staff captain and the navigator having leaped overboard into the warm embrace of the Med when the shooting began.
‘Merda!’ spat Abandonato. ‘Bastardi codardi!’
He activated the Windsor Castle’s distress beacon, picking up the ship-to-shore telephone – as though the authorities were not already aware of what was happening.
He pressed the click-to-talk.
And then he saw movement outside.
A young man.
Abandonato recognised him.
An assistant purser?
No, a waiter.