Sea of Terror by Stephen Coonts Page B

line."
    "Okay. Let me go through and show them it's okay."
    He walked into the white smooth-surfaced tunnel, turned, and held out his arms. "See, everyone? Nothing to it!"
    One by one, the members of Myers' tour group followed him through the tunnel, some hesitantly, some with dogged determination, some fearfully, some with good-natured banter. Judy Dunne hobbled through step-by-step with her walker. Myers hoped that the security personnel were getting a good look at all of their skeletons, or whatever it was that they were looking at. A more unlikely terrorist group he couldn't imagine... though Ms. Caruthers did come close. She was, in his opinion and at the very least, a royal pain in the ass.
    A few--Caruthers, Polmar, Jones, the Kleins, Kathy Morton--chose to follow the security guard off to the side and were engaged in a spirited discussion with him.
    The Elderly Ladies' Home Terrorist and Sewing Circle, Myers thought. With a grimace, he turned and walked back to join the discussion.
    This really was going to be his last time as a tour group guide.
    Atlantis Queen pier side Southampton, England Thursday, 1420 hours GMT
    The gray morning's overcast was breaking at last, giving way to bright sunlight. Several hundred feet aft from the Atlantis Queen's boarding gangway, the garage-sized doors to her main cargo hold on A Deck had been slid open and another lorry filled with crates of provisions drove up alongside.
    Chester Darrow picked up his electronic clipboard and walked down the loading ramp to meet with the driver. "Good afternoon!" he called cheerfully. "What do you have for us?"
    "More food," the driver said with a disinterested shrug. "Where do you want it?"
    "Let's see what it is first," Darrow said. "What's the lading number?"
    A cruise ship the size of the Atlantis Queen had a population as large as many towns--almost three thousand in all. The amount of food and other consumables required for a two-week cruise was staggering in its amount and in its variety. So far, Darrow had checked aboard twenty-five tons of beef, five tons of lamb, five and a half tons of pork, four tons of veal, a ton of sausage, seven and a half tons of chicken, three tons of turkey, nine tons of fish, and two tons of lobster ... and the loading was continuing as more and more shipments arrived at the pier. In two weeks, the four restaurants on board the Queen would run through almost twenty-five tons of fresh vegetables, four thousand liters of ice cream, four tons of rice, five tons of coffee, fifteen tons of potatoes, twenty tons of fresh fruit, five tons of sugar, and twenty thousand liters of milk. Her alcohol lockers routinely stocked over four thousand bottles of assorted wines, three hundred of champagne, four hundred of vodka, five hundred of whiskey, and a thousand of assorted liqueurs ... not to mention some eighteen thousand cans or bottles of a bewildering selection of beers.
    The Atlantis Queen's guests and crew wouldn't consume all of that vast mountain of food and drink in two weeks, of course. A percentage was held against the possibility of a delay somewhere along the line and as a precaution against the unthinkable--that the ship's larders would actually run out of something toward the end of the cruise. The ship's commissary department would also have the opportunity to buy fresh provisions along the way--in Greece and Turkey, especially--if anything in the ship's computerized lists of stores appeared to be running low.
    Odd, the manifest the driver handed Darrow was in a different format than the one routinely used by the Royal Sky Line. It listed the truck's contents as two tons of rice, three tons of potatoes, and one ton of sugar . . . but he'd already checked four tons of rice on board that morning and they weren't scheduled to receive any more. There'd been a screwup somewhere down the line.
    "I'm sorry," Darrow said, handing the clipboard back.
    "I can't take this. I'll need to check it with the commissary