Reprisal!- The Eagle's Sorrow

by Cliff Roberts

  “What about the G7, sir?” Combs blurted out, trying to change the subject as well as to get Starks to stop and finish the conversation.

  “What about them? If it’s golden, we’re on board; if it’s not, then we’re not. Make it happen, Jason,” Starks shouted as he stepped into his private elevator that would take him to the residence.

  Combs stood and began walking towards his office, but stopped, then turned around and took a long, hard look at Bascome. “What?” Bascome asked, without looking up from his notes, having sensed the other man was looking at him.

  “Are we really going to spy on a senator?” Combs asked.

  “Who said spy?” Bascome replied. “I’m just going to ask a few friends if they have heard anything and make sure Justice knows we think there is a problem. That’s all,” Bascome stated as he gave Combs a hard look in return. Combs turned and walked into his office without saying anything else. Bascome quickly closed his notebook and followed him.

  Once in Combs’ office, Bascome closed the door behind him. He turned towards Combs and snarled, “What the hell is wrong with you? That conversation could have been taped. Probably was. Never state anything that clearly in there again! Do you understand that?”

  “What the hell are we doing? First, we have no choice but to take the money to win the election, and then we have to take the money to keep from being exposed, and now we’re going to start spying on American citizens? What are we going to do next? Have her killed?” Combs asked with a squeak in his voice.

  “We are going to do what it takes to stay in power and be elected to another term. If you haven’t the stomach for real politics, you should resign now,” Bascome stated flatly.

  “Pressuring congressmen to vote for the president’s policies is one thing, but spying on a senator?” Combs lamented.

  “You’re playing with the big boys now. Get your head out of your ass and smell the coffee, boy. You don’t think that the senator and her friends have spies in this building, right under our noses? Hell, yes, she does. And so does every other senator. It’s how the game is played,” Bascome curtly informed Combs as he turned and left his office.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The cargo freighter was of Libyan registry, weighing in at one hundred and forty tons—not exactly big as freighters go, but the right size and nimble enough for getting in and out of the small ports that dot the shores of the Arabian Peninsula. It had picked up cargo at the port of Suez and was now stopping at the capital of Djibouti. They unloaded the same cargo they had just picked up in the port of Suez—four very large crates, eight feet by eight feet by ten feet, weighing over two tons apiece. The deck cranes struggled to load them.

  The aptain noticed the Cyrillic writing on the crates, Russian to be precise, but he said nothing. It wasn’t any of his business what was shipped, who had shipped it, or even who they were shipped to. His only concern was how much he got paid to deliver them, which was a handsome amount in this case.

  The Emperor of the Sands was a familiar site in these waters. She made the trip from the port of Suez to Kuwait City every week. Sometimes she went as far as Karachi, Pakistan or Mumbai, India, but not this trip. From here, she would sail to the port of Aden in Yemen, where she would make her next cargo drop, then across the Arabian Sea to the capital of Oman, Muscat, for another drop and a pickup, then into the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, where they would stop in Dubai and Bahrain before making the final delivery in Kuwait City.

  The return trip would be the most profitable leg of this trip. The ship would be loaded with cargo for the port of Suez, plus a special shipment consisting of fifty men who were part of Al-Qaeda and fourteen tons of their weapons and ammunition to be dropped off in Bosaso, Somalia on the Gulf of Aden.

  The village they were bound for was a very poor village—a community of a few hundred fishermen and their families. What reason they had for going there wasn’t his concern; they had offered to pay him twice the amount needed to cover his expenses for the entire voyage, and that was enough for him.

  *****

  Bob checked his watch and cursed loudly as he reached for the satphone. The intelligence he had just seen was a day old and should have crossed his desk yesterday. With the time difference and the patrol area being so spread out, it was probably too late to make an effective intervention, but he had to try.

  The phone was answered on the third ring. Carrie, the boss’ former adjutant, turned assistant, quickly transferred the call to Chip. He was actually down at the docks, where Chip was considering going fishing for the first time since he was kid.

  General Charles (Chip) Clarett, retired Marine Corps Commandant and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs was now the vice president in charge of corporate security for Kilauea Corp. He had moved to this beautiful tropical island in the Caribbean when he took Steven Howard’s offer to work for him after the terror attacks on Houston and San Antonio.

  His position of vice president in charge of corporate security actually wasn’t all that taxing, and Chip, having now spent several months on the job, had found he was bored far too much of the time, so he was considering going fishing as a diversion.

  The skiff’s captain, Eddie Newman, a former Navy commander, assured him that fishing on the ocean and fishing in a pond, were two completely different things. First of all, the fish were usually bigger; and second, nothing in the pond would be jumping out of the water to try to eat you. Although it may seem odd, that was the part that had piqued Chip’s interest the most.

  “Clarett,” Chip answered in his usual gruff manner.

  “Chip, it’s Bob. You alone?” Bob asked.

  Taking a few steps away from the skiff, Chip replied, “I am now.”

  “I’m sorry to bring this to your attention so late, but it just crossed my desk. Some sort of software glitch in decoding, which I’ll fix after we talk,” Bob explained when Chip interrupted.

  “Get to the point, Bob. It sounds important.”

  “Okay. U.S. Cencom, the military command in Afghanistan, has NTEL intel that says a group of more than fifty Al-Qaeda fighters were to leave Kuwait City en route to some fishing village in Somalia yesterday. It’s on the northern coast of the horn across from Aden, a place called Bosaso.

  “They were sailing on a freighter called The Emperor of the Sands, a Libyan registered vessel. In addition to the men, they were also carrying fourteen tons of weapons and ammo. There was no itinerary filed by the ship’s captain, so we don’t know if it was a straight-through run or if they were going to make some stops along the way,” Bob explained.

  “Shit, that’s a tempting target. Do we know what time they sailed?” Chip asked.

  Bob flipped a couple of pages and found the time. “Afternoon tide, around 1500 hours, local time.”

  “When?” Chip asked.

  “Yesterday,” Bill responded. “Yesterday.”

  “Okay, I’ll make some calls and see what we can do. Maybe we can still rendezvous with the Emperor,” Chip said. He ended that call only to immediately dial Carrie’s office number so she could connect him with the Rip Tide, one of three submarines that Kilauea Corp. operated. Kilauea Corp. had purchased them from the British through several shell companies stating they were for deep underwater research projects.

  All three subs had been refurbished in an old Soviet naval shipyard outside Murmansk. The reconfiguration allowed them to become stealthy supply and troop transports, as well as remaining formidable war machines. They arrived at or left the Kilauea R&D facility at night, when their dark, blue-green hulls would not be seen in the crystal clear waters surrounding the private island.

  The Rip Tide was captained by Rod Hodson and was on patrol in the Indian Ocean not far from the Gulf of Aden. After five minutes, Chip was connected to the Rip Tide—something considered a near miracle to have happened so quickly. It must have been cruising shallow, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to receive the incoming transmission.

  “
Hey, Hot Rod, the boss here. I’ve got some intelligence for you,” Chip said as soon as Hodson came on line.

  “That sounds good to me, boss. The crew is getting a little stir crazy. It is some kind of boring just floating around out here. What’s the target?” Hodson inquired.

  “I’m hoping it’s still viable. The intelligence is a little stale,” Chip explained.

  “We’ll give it a try anyway. We’ve got nothing better to do.” Hodson sounded like a man who was truly bored.

  “What? Are those winner-takes-all Parcheesi games not cutting it?” Chip quipped.

  “Everybody’s broke and the porn magazines are three months old,” Hodson quipped back, chuckling.

  “So, here’s the deal. We’ve got a small freighter coming out the Persian Gulf headed for the north coast of Somalia. A village called Bosasso. The freighter is named Emperor of the Sands, and it is registered in Libya. She’s carrying at least fifty Al-Qaeda, plus fourteen tons of weapons and ammo for them. She sailed at 1500 hours local time yesterday from the northern gulf,” Chip reported.

  “We might be able to intercept. It’ll depend on her speed and whether she stopped along the way.”

  “We haven’t any info on her schedule, so don’t know if she did or not,” Chip added.

  “We’re about fifty miles east-northeast of Mogadishu. We’ll set a course right away,” Captain Hodson replied. “Hey, boss, one other thing—once we find and sink this freighter, I’d like to meet up with one of the supply ships to restock our fish. I don’t want to be caught light. Oh, yeah, and how about some fresh movies and magazines? It wouldn’t hurt morale, you know.”

  “I’ll make it happen. The intelligence and ship bio will be downloaded in a few minutes,” Chip stated before hanging up. Chip then made a note to have the three subs outfitted with whatever it took to be able to intercept satellite television.

  The Rip Tide quickly adjusted her course and headed north to a point due north of the Yemeni island of Abd al-Kuri in the Arabian Sea at the eastern tip of the horn of Africa. After calculating the time and distance that the freighter had to travel, Captain Hodson was confident that the Rip Tide would be waiting when it arrived.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The wind on the river was bitterly cold. Yousef instantly regretted that no one had considered the weather during the planning stages. It was an oversight he would be sure to rectify on his next mission, if he lived through this one. Aijaz was at the helm, and the other men tried their best to hide from the wind behind him and the meter wide windscreen.

  To keep up the appearance that they were fishing, Yousef had them place their poles at various spots at the back of the boat and dangle their lines in the water. He had noticed that several of the other boats on the water this morning had already caught fish by trolling the river. By appearing to be trolling like the other boats, it helped them to blend right in.

  Yousef knew that they wouldn’t be distracted by catching any fish because the lines weren’t baited or even had hooks at the ends of them. It was decided early in the planning that they didn’t need to be playing around with fish while on a mission for Allah.

  Shortly after ten o’clock, the VLST (very large super tanker) LNG tanker that the assault team would commandeer passed in the main shipping channel to their right. Its name was the Empirical City, registered in Liberia according to the bow and the company’s website. At 1,156 feet long, it was the largest ship that could safely navigate the river into the port of Hamburg. As it passed, Yousef noticed that the crew consisted of all black men, and he wondered if they were Muslims. He knew many in Africa had converted to Islam, and it would be a shame to kill them if they were.

  Yousef followed the ship’s progress back upriver towards Hamburg, until he found himself looking at the skyline of the city. He wondered how the world would compensate for its loss. The city had so many architectural wonders, from the churches to the hundreds of ornate canal-spanning bridges Hamburg was famous for.

  He wondered if the tunnels under the Warehouse Quarter would survive or if they would be crushed under the weight of the buildings above as they collapsed. He thought of Old Town with its eighteenth century buildings so lovingly restored over the years after World War II and the carpet bombing by the Allies.

  Hamburg was such a vibrant city—a major hub of commerce—it was a shame that he couldn’t do away with the unbelievers and keep the city intact. The city’s museums housed some of the finest art in the world, and after today, they would all be lost. He felt no pleasure in the thought of destroying the city, but he was just a foot soldier for Allah, and it was Allah’s will that the infidels be killed or converted. In a few short hours, he would know if it was truly Allah’s will for this city to be destroyed. If it was, the city would be annihilated. If it wasn’t, he would be dead.

  At eleven o’clock, they picked up speed, completely dropping the ruse of trolling. The wind had picked up, becoming bitterly cold and causing a chop on the river. The men quickly began to feel seasick as they bounced northward while crouching low, keeping their heads down out of the wind-driven spray.

  Yousef and his team arrived at the harbor master’s at 12:15, quickly tying off their small boat. Yousef left his men standing outside, out of sight of the windows and the large glass doors, while he went inside. Upon entering the harbor master’s offices, he found an attractive, young blonde woman seated behind a desk and an old man in the next office on the radio with a ship that was about to moor off the mouth of the river. Yousef asked the young woman if he would need any special paperwork to have their large yacht sailed upriver to Hamburg and also wanted to know the procedures for hiring a harbor pilot, since the owner of the yacht wasn’t sure he wanted the ship’s captain to have to deal with the unfamiliar waterway.

  The young blonde woman went to the file cabinet and began removing several papers as the old man signed off the radio. When he stepped from his office, he asked if he could be of any assistance. Yousef asked again about the procedures for hiring a harbor pilot and thanked the young woman for the proper forms. The old man explained that the pilot got paid before he piloted the ship anywhere and that the forms had to be filled out completely. He suggested that Yousef take a seat at an open desk and fill them out right now.

  Before starting the paperwork, though, Yousef asked to see the boat on which the harbor pilot would arrive so that he could tell the security people on board the yacht what to expect. This prompted the old man to lead him out the back door to the dock where their boat was moored.

  Following a short hallway towards the rear of the building, Yousef and the old man, who had failed to introduce himself, passed two small offices. The first was empty; but the second was occupied by two men who were sitting eating lunch. Yousef asked who they were and the old man explained that they were the boat’s crew and he’d introduce them if Yousef chose the hire a pilot.

  Once outside, the old man pointed out a small, enclosed boat that had a raised pilot house. “This will be the boat that will bring the harbor pilot and his spotter out to your vessel. They will pull up to the ship and drop off the pilot. The spotter then waits for the signal that the ship is ready to move, then he will depart and lead the ship upstream,” the old man explained as he stepped up next to the boat, turned around and smiled at Yousef.

  “Are there any obstructions in the river that might cause us some trouble navigating a large yacht?” Yousef asked, wanting to know if the information they had been given was true or not.

  “Nine,” the old man stated, but then added, “The river is navigable by deep draft ships to the city center, but after that, it’s only navigable by shallow draft vessels. Too much shifting silt.”

  “Oh, then we should be fine since we are only going that far,” Yousef replied with a smile as he stepped up, face to face with the old man. The old man looked at Yousef, clearly confused by his stepping so close to him. Just as he was about to say something, Yousef pulled a knife from his right hand coat po
cket, plunging it up to the hilt into the old man’s throat just under his chin.

  He then pulled it sideways, slicing through his windpipe and severing the carotid artery in his neck. The old man, his eyes wide with surprise and fright, stumbled backwards towards the edge of the dock clutching at his throat. Yousef stepped forward and gave him a slight push, sending the man over the edge of the dock and into the water between the dock and the loosely tethered boat.