Items related to Sea of Terror (Deep Black Series)
THE ENEMY IS ON BOARD. Two massive ships are on a dual path to destruction. One is a freighter carrying nuclear materials to Japan; the other, a cruise ship heading for the Mediterranean. Neither will reach their destinations. Two factions―Japanese eco-terrorists and Middle East extremists―have joined forces to infiltrate the ships, incapacitate the crew, and change course toward a common target: the United States of America. DETONATION HOUR IS APPROACHING. In Washington, Charlie Dean and a team of commandos are dispatched on a life-or-death mission to blow the hijackers’ plot out of the water. Their plan: board the ship unnoticed, pose as ordinary passengers, and overtake the terrorists. But time is running out. The seized ships are crossing the Atlantic with the combined strength of a full-scale nuclear torpedo. And New York City is just on the horizon.... “Coonts knows how to write and build suspense. . . a natural storyteller.” ― The New York Times Book Review “The master of the techno-thriller.” ― Publishers Weekly
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
STEPHEN COONTS is the author of sixteen New York Times bestselling books that have been translated and published around the world. A former naval aviator and Vietnam combat veteran, he is a graduate of West Virginia University and the University of Colorado School of Law. He lives in Colorado.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
1
Royal Sky Line Security Office
Southampton, England
Thursday, 1127 hours GMT
“MY GOD, MITCHELL!” CHARLIE Dean said, shaking his head. “You have got to be freaking kidding!”
“You know better than that, Mr. Dean,” Thomas Mitchell said. “MI5 never kids.”
Dean was sitting with the three security people at a console at the center of a large room, hanging one floor above the security checkpoint leading from the Royal Sky cruise ship terminal out to the dock. In front of them was a giant flat-screen TV monitor, on which the black-and-white image of a naked man could be seen walking through a broad, white tunnel. To one side, a much smaller security monitor showed the same man, this time from a high angle near the ceiling and in color, wearing dark trousers, a yellow shirt, and a white nylon jacket.
“Yeah,” Dean agreed cautiously. “When it comes to a sense of humor, you’re worse than the FBI and CIA put together. But since when did you guys turn into pornographic voyeurs?”
“Believe me, Mr. Dean,” the woman sitting next to him at the console said. Her name badge bore the name “Lockwood,” and she was, Dean knew, a technical specialist with X-Star Security, the company that manufactured the equipment. “There is nothing whatsoever pornographic about this!” She sounded prim and somewhat affronted.
“That’s right,” David Llewellyn added, grinning. “After the first couple of hundred naked bodies, you don’t even notice!”
Thomas Mitchell was an operative with MI5, Great Britain’s government bureau handling counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and internal security in general, while David Llewellyn was the head of the Security Department on board the cruise ship Atlantis Queen. Dean had met Mitchell in Washington a week earlier, and knew him to be a dour and somewhat unimaginative British civil servant; he’d met Llewellyn and Lockwood only that morning, when Mitchell had escorted him into the Royal Sky Line’s Southampton security section.
“That hardly matters, does it?” Dean said. “It’s their privacy at stake, not how many naked people you’ve seen in your career.”
Interesting, Mitchell thought. Llewellyn was seeing bodies. Dean was seeing people.
“I needn’t remind you, Mr. Dean,” Mitchell said, “that conventional metal detectors simply cannot pick up plastic bottles containing explosives or petrol, hard-nylon knives, or anything else made of plastic. Richard Reid walked through metal detectors several times before he boarded Flight Sixty-three.”
Richard Reid had been the infamous “shoe bomber” who’d been subdued by passengers on board an American Airlines Boeing 767 in December of 2001. He’d been trying to light a fuse in one of his shoes, which had been packed with PETN plastic explosives and a triacetone triperoxide detonator. Ever since, airline passengers in the United States had been required to remove their shoes at airport terminal security checkpoints.
Charlie Dean had considerable experience with anti-terrorist security technologies of all types. A senior field officer of the U.S. National Security Agency’s top-secret Desk Three, he’d circumvented quite a few of them while on covert missions overseas, and he’d gone through more than his fair share at secure installations back home. In fact, he’d read about this technology some years ago, though he’d never seen it in operation. It was called backscatter X-ray scanning, and it was the latest twist in high-tech security screening... as well as the most controversial.
“I seem to remember seeing this sort of thing in a movie, once,” Dean said. “Slapstick stuff.”
“Airport,” Lockwood said, rolling her eyes. “Yes, we’ve been told. Numerous times.”
The man on the screen was somewhat pixelated by the digital imaging process, but every detail stood out with startling clarity, from the frames of his glasses to the zipper of his open jacket—every detail except his clothing, which had been rendered invisible. His face seemed a little blank; Dean could see his eyeballs and eyelids easily enough, but the iris and pupil were almost impossible to distinguish.
But the rest! The guy was heavy, his belly bulging strangely over an invisible belt. His belt buckle appeared to ride tucked in beneath the bulge just below his navel, and he was wearing a small, bright crucifix on a chain around his neck. His pubic hair, the trail of hair up his belly to his navel, and the thicket on his chest and back all had a crisp, wiry, almost metallic look to it. Dean could just make out the zipper in the trousers at the man’s crotch, and it was clear, as an older generation of men’s tailors would have put it, that he “dressed to the left.”
“I thought,” Dean said, “that there was supposed to be a software algorithm that blurred faces and... other body parts.”
“Oh, sure, some places still do that,” Llewellyn replied. “But that rather defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? People have tried smuggling guns or drugs hidden at their crotch or between their butt cheeks, where they think a pat-down wouldn’t find them.” He made a face. “You Americans are so squeamish about this sort of thing.”
Lockwood typed a command into the keyboard in front of her, and on the big screen the man’s computer-processed image seemed to freeze, then revolved in space for a moment, showing his body from all possible angles. At the right of the screen, a column of data appeared as it was forwarded off a security card the man was carrying—his name, passport number, cell and home phone numbers, Social Security number.
“Show us level two,” Mitchell told her.
Lockwood typed in another command, triggering a small flood of data. James Gullabry, it seemed, was American, was visiting England on business, and was a sales rep for Del Rey Computers. He lived in Westchester, just outside of Boston; he had a wife, Anne, and two children... and was on medication for depression and for type 2 diabetes. Apparently, he was taking the long way home, by way of a Mediterranean cruise. That, Dean thought, was unusual.
“What... you don’t have his credit history?”
“We can call that up for you, if you want,” Mitchell said.
And Dean knew the man wasn’t joking.
It’s not that Americans are squeamish about nudity, Dean thought, watching the image on the screen, though that was of course a factor. The whole privacy issue had become a hot button on both sides of the Atlantic in the paranoid years since 9/11. MI5 itself had been called on the carpet back in 2006, he recalled, when a member of Parliament had disclosed that the security agency maintained extremely detailed and highly secret files on 272,000 British subjects—the equivalent of 1 in every 160 adults.
How far did you go to stop the threat of terrorism, and to protect your citizens?
Where did you draw the line between protecting your citizens... and spying on them?
The man on the screen walked off to the left. A moment later, he was replaced by an attractive young woman. She was wearing a bracelet, a watch, two rings, a single-strand necklace, and small, bright bits of jewelry in her navel and through both nipples. Quite obviously she was not carrying a gun... or anything else for that matter, not even a book of matches. Hurriedly Dean looked away, focusing instead on the security cam image that showed a pleasant-looking woman in her twenties, wearing a skirt and a bright green blouse and with an exuberant cascade of long blond hair hanging down past her waist.
Damn it, he was embarrassed.
And yet Mitchell had a point. Dean remembered a humorous but half-serious comment that had floated about in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror hijackings... something to the effect that the only way to ensure passenger safety on an airline flight would be to strip every passenger stark naked and handcuff them to their seats.
Technology had all but delivered the first of those two requirements.
Lockwood used her keyboard to call up the woman’s information.
“O-kay, then, Miss Johnson,” Llewellyn said, reading her name off the screen. “Here, Mr. Dean. Watch this.”
He turned a dial on his console, and on the big screen the young woman’s hair faded to a pale transparency, then vanished completely. A plastic hair clip continued to hang unsupported behind her now completely bald head, and Dean noticed that her tuft of pubic hair had vanished as well. Somehow, if possible, the complete lack of hair made her appear even more shockingly naked.
“We can adjust the strength of the X-ray beams,” Mitchell explained. “We’ve had people try to hide stuff in long hair, men and women both.” He glanced at Dean, and seemed to read his expression. “Look, I know it’s intrusive... but most people would rather have this than have security guards frisk them... or put them through a strip search!”
“Both of which slow down the queue,” Lockwood added, “and make for unfortunate delays at the security checkpoints.”
“Do they have a choice?” Dean asked.
“Oh, yes,” Llewellyn told him. “They can walk through the machine, or they can submit to a hand search. Of course they have a choice!”
Dean wondered if most people knew they even had that option. That had been a problem with trials in the United States, he remembered... that, and the fact that most people simply didn’t know how graphically revealing this sort of device actually could be. They heard “X-ray” and immediately thought of medical X-rays, black-and-white transparencies showing decidedly non-erotic shado...
Royal Sky Line Security Office
Southampton, England
Thursday, 1127 hours GMT
“MY GOD, MITCHELL!” CHARLIE Dean said, shaking his head. “You have got to be freaking kidding!”
“You know better than that, Mr. Dean,” Thomas Mitchell said. “MI5 never kids.”
Dean was sitting with the three security people at a console at the center of a large room, hanging one floor above the security checkpoint leading from the Royal Sky cruise ship terminal out to the dock. In front of them was a giant flat-screen TV monitor, on which the black-and-white image of a naked man could be seen walking through a broad, white tunnel. To one side, a much smaller security monitor showed the same man, this time from a high angle near the ceiling and in color, wearing dark trousers, a yellow shirt, and a white nylon jacket.
“Yeah,” Dean agreed cautiously. “When it comes to a sense of humor, you’re worse than the FBI and CIA put together. But since when did you guys turn into pornographic voyeurs?”
“Believe me, Mr. Dean,” the woman sitting next to him at the console said. Her name badge bore the name “Lockwood,” and she was, Dean knew, a technical specialist with X-Star Security, the company that manufactured the equipment. “There is nothing whatsoever pornographic about this!” She sounded prim and somewhat affronted.
“That’s right,” David Llewellyn added, grinning. “After the first couple of hundred naked bodies, you don’t even notice!”
Thomas Mitchell was an operative with MI5, Great Britain’s government bureau handling counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and internal security in general, while David Llewellyn was the head of the Security Department on board the cruise ship Atlantis Queen. Dean had met Mitchell in Washington a week earlier, and knew him to be a dour and somewhat unimaginative British civil servant; he’d met Llewellyn and Lockwood only that morning, when Mitchell had escorted him into the Royal Sky Line’s Southampton security section.
“That hardly matters, does it?” Dean said. “It’s their privacy at stake, not how many naked people you’ve seen in your career.”
Interesting, Mitchell thought. Llewellyn was seeing bodies. Dean was seeing people.
“I needn’t remind you, Mr. Dean,” Mitchell said, “that conventional metal detectors simply cannot pick up plastic bottles containing explosives or petrol, hard-nylon knives, or anything else made of plastic. Richard Reid walked through metal detectors several times before he boarded Flight Sixty-three.”
Richard Reid had been the infamous “shoe bomber” who’d been subdued by passengers on board an American Airlines Boeing 767 in December of 2001. He’d been trying to light a fuse in one of his shoes, which had been packed with PETN plastic explosives and a triacetone triperoxide detonator. Ever since, airline passengers in the United States had been required to remove their shoes at airport terminal security checkpoints.
Charlie Dean had considerable experience with anti-terrorist security technologies of all types. A senior field officer of the U.S. National Security Agency’s top-secret Desk Three, he’d circumvented quite a few of them while on covert missions overseas, and he’d gone through more than his fair share at secure installations back home. In fact, he’d read about this technology some years ago, though he’d never seen it in operation. It was called backscatter X-ray scanning, and it was the latest twist in high-tech security screening... as well as the most controversial.
“I seem to remember seeing this sort of thing in a movie, once,” Dean said. “Slapstick stuff.”
“Airport,” Lockwood said, rolling her eyes. “Yes, we’ve been told. Numerous times.”
The man on the screen was somewhat pixelated by the digital imaging process, but every detail stood out with startling clarity, from the frames of his glasses to the zipper of his open jacket—every detail except his clothing, which had been rendered invisible. His face seemed a little blank; Dean could see his eyeballs and eyelids easily enough, but the iris and pupil were almost impossible to distinguish.
But the rest! The guy was heavy, his belly bulging strangely over an invisible belt. His belt buckle appeared to ride tucked in beneath the bulge just below his navel, and he was wearing a small, bright crucifix on a chain around his neck. His pubic hair, the trail of hair up his belly to his navel, and the thicket on his chest and back all had a crisp, wiry, almost metallic look to it. Dean could just make out the zipper in the trousers at the man’s crotch, and it was clear, as an older generation of men’s tailors would have put it, that he “dressed to the left.”
“I thought,” Dean said, “that there was supposed to be a software algorithm that blurred faces and... other body parts.”
“Oh, sure, some places still do that,” Llewellyn replied. “But that rather defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? People have tried smuggling guns or drugs hidden at their crotch or between their butt cheeks, where they think a pat-down wouldn’t find them.” He made a face. “You Americans are so squeamish about this sort of thing.”
Lockwood typed a command into the keyboard in front of her, and on the big screen the man’s computer-processed image seemed to freeze, then revolved in space for a moment, showing his body from all possible angles. At the right of the screen, a column of data appeared as it was forwarded off a security card the man was carrying—his name, passport number, cell and home phone numbers, Social Security number.
“Show us level two,” Mitchell told her.
Lockwood typed in another command, triggering a small flood of data. James Gullabry, it seemed, was American, was visiting England on business, and was a sales rep for Del Rey Computers. He lived in Westchester, just outside of Boston; he had a wife, Anne, and two children... and was on medication for depression and for type 2 diabetes. Apparently, he was taking the long way home, by way of a Mediterranean cruise. That, Dean thought, was unusual.
“What... you don’t have his credit history?”
“We can call that up for you, if you want,” Mitchell said.
And Dean knew the man wasn’t joking.
It’s not that Americans are squeamish about nudity, Dean thought, watching the image on the screen, though that was of course a factor. The whole privacy issue had become a hot button on both sides of the Atlantic in the paranoid years since 9/11. MI5 itself had been called on the carpet back in 2006, he recalled, when a member of Parliament had disclosed that the security agency maintained extremely detailed and highly secret files on 272,000 British subjects—the equivalent of 1 in every 160 adults.
How far did you go to stop the threat of terrorism, and to protect your citizens?
Where did you draw the line between protecting your citizens... and spying on them?
The man on the screen walked off to the left. A moment later, he was replaced by an attractive young woman. She was wearing a bracelet, a watch, two rings, a single-strand necklace, and small, bright bits of jewelry in her navel and through both nipples. Quite obviously she was not carrying a gun... or anything else for that matter, not even a book of matches. Hurriedly Dean looked away, focusing instead on the security cam image that showed a pleasant-looking woman in her twenties, wearing a skirt and a bright green blouse and with an exuberant cascade of long blond hair hanging down past her waist.
Damn it, he was embarrassed.
And yet Mitchell had a point. Dean remembered a humorous but half-serious comment that had floated about in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror hijackings... something to the effect that the only way to ensure passenger safety on an airline flight would be to strip every passenger stark naked and handcuff them to their seats.
Technology had all but delivered the first of those two requirements.
Lockwood used her keyboard to call up the woman’s information.
“O-kay, then, Miss Johnson,” Llewellyn said, reading her name off the screen. “Here, Mr. Dean. Watch this.”
He turned a dial on his console, and on the big screen the young woman’s hair faded to a pale transparency, then vanished completely. A plastic hair clip continued to hang unsupported behind her now completely bald head, and Dean noticed that her tuft of pubic hair had vanished as well. Somehow, if possible, the complete lack of hair made her appear even more shockingly naked.
“We can adjust the strength of the X-ray beams,” Mitchell explained. “We’ve had people try to hide stuff in long hair, men and women both.” He glanced at Dean, and seemed to read his expression. “Look, I know it’s intrusive... but most people would rather have this than have security guards frisk them... or put them through a strip search!”
“Both of which slow down the queue,” Lockwood added, “and make for unfortunate delays at the security checkpoints.”
“Do they have a choice?” Dean asked.
“Oh, yes,” Llewellyn told him. “They can walk through the machine, or they can submit to a hand search. Of course they have a choice!”
Dean wondered if most people knew they even had that option. That had been a problem with trials in the United States, he remembered... that, and the fact that most people simply didn’t know how graphically revealing this sort of device actually could be. They heard “X-ray” and immediately thought of medical X-rays, black-and-white transparencies showing decidedly non-erotic shado...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBrilliance Audio
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 1423344200
- ISBN 13 9781423344209
- BindingAudio CD
- Rating
Buy New
Learn more about this copy
US$ 11.99
Shipping:
US$ 4.97
Within U.S.A.
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Stock Image
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Sea of Terror
Seller:
Rating
Book Description AudioCD. Condition: New. 5 AUDIO CDs Brand New in the shrink wrap box. Factory Sealed. Publisher remainder mark to the shrink wrap. NEW. Enjoy this gift quality audio performance!. Seller Inventory # NewCDs615110056
Buy New
US$ 11.99
Convert currency
Stock Image
Sea of Terror (Deep Black Series)
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: Good. SHIPS FROM USA. Used books have different signs of use and do not include supplemental materials such as CDs, Dvds, Access Codes, charts or any other extra material. All used books might have various degrees of writing, highliting and wear and tear and possibly be an ex-library with the usual stickers and stamps. Dust Jackets are not guaranteed and when still present, they will have various degrees of tear and damage. All images are Stock Photos, not of the actual item. book. Seller Inventory # 32-1423344200-G
Buy Used
US$ 24.09
Convert currency