LITMIR.BIZ

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to the cabin he shared with an Indonesian oiler.

      After a few minutes, he left the cabin and walked back down to the engine room of the Windsor Castle.

      First engineer Phil Clarke was standing looking up at the various monitors and LCD panels, clipboard still in hand.

      Off to the side, the third engineer was talking an engine cadet through a minor issue they’d had with one of the oil pressure gauges.

      No-one paid the young Filipino any notice.

      Until he walked up behind Clarke and, without warning, plunged a kitchen knife into his upper back.

      The blade slid off the edge of Clarke’s right scapula, bending under the force of the blow, and plunged through his right lung, clipping the edge of his heart, and burying itself in the cartilage where his ribcage met his sternum.

      The first engineer fell forward and hit the floor, gasping and dying, blood flowering on his shirt and spurting onto the steel deck.

      The motorman calmly looked down at him and then turned round.

      The two other men were staring at him in horror.

      The third engineer, torque wrench hanging slack in his hand, took a step forwards.

      ‘What…?’ he said.

      But he got no further.

      Ebrahim, his mind and body fizzing with adrenalin and hope, raised his arms above his head, as his instructor had shown him, to arm the built-in mercury tilt-switch attached to the suicide vest that he was now wearing underneath his red overalls.

      In the event that anyone tried to take him down, that switch would initiate the eight one-kilogram blocks of military-grade C4 plastic explosive, each taped up with approximately two hundred steel ball-bearings, which were sitting in the pouches of the hand-made canvas waistcoat.

      Unbeknownst to Ebrahim, the vest contained a further switch, which meant that the device would detonate if he tried to remove it once it was clipped on.

      This was designed to deal with any change of heart on the part of the young martyr.

      But he had no such change of heart.

      ‘Allahu akbar!’ he shouted, staring at the two men in front of him. ‘Allahu akbar!’

      At the same time, he closed his fist around the button in his hand, which was attached by two feet of copper wire to the electrical detonator on his vest. The wires met, and the contact sent a pulse to the detonator, the resultant explosion in turn initiating the detonation cord linking the blocks of C4. The det cord exploded at 8,000 metres per second, igniting the C4 and spreading 1,600 ball bearings out through 360 degrees with the destructive force of a thousand shotguns.

      The explosive energy turned Farouk Ebrahim into a pink mist where he stood.

      A millisecond later the molten shrapnel destroyed all of the computers and levers and LCD screens and gauges in that end of the engine room, threw the four Converteam/Rolls-Royce engines instantly offline, and shredded the other men.

      They did not even register the flash of the explosion which obliterated them.

13.

      UP ON THE BRIDGE of the MS Windsor Castle, the power surged and died, and then the emergency batteries came on line.

      A second later, a red light began flashing, and a horn started sounding.

      Fire in the engine room.

      The staff captain wasn’t unduly disturbed – on a vessel of this sophistication, 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.’

14.

      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

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