Reprisal!- The Eagle's Sorrow

by Cliff Roberts

  “The proud, yet foolish, Vikings refused conversion to Islam. The sheik, not wishing to waste any more time on them, ordered them to be dragged to the desert where they were stripped of their clothes and then buried alive up to their necks. Honey was then poured over their heads and they were left to the bugs and the buzzards.

  “There is a stretch of desert there that even now bears the reminder of that day. The place is called ‘The Vikings Grave.’ The sand still has a slight pink hue to it and rain never falls there.” Yousef finished with a broad smile plastered across his face.

  “You’re full of shit!” The captain spat, not believing a word of the story.

  “Maybe so,” Yousef replied, the smile ebbing away as his men snickered, “but the lesson is that Allah is in control. He delayed the Vikings so the sheik could have his army in place when they arrived. Allah gave the sheik a great victory and then, because Allah is great and merciful, he had the Sheik offer to spare their lives if they chose to stop their murdering and stealing and convert to Islam. I have done the same as I was taught in the Holy Koran. If just one man is honest enough, godly enough, to convert to Islam, I will spare the city of Hamburg. If not, I will go to be with Allah, my conscience clear,” Yousef explained.

  “You are a mad man!” The captain shouted at Yousef. “You’ll kill thousands in the name of some perverted religion that tells you to kill all non-believers! You are the evil that stalks mankind, you Islamic bastard!”

  Yousef swung the gun to bear on the captain and fired it, twice. Both shots struck the captain in the chest. For the briefest of moments, he stood rigidly, his eyes wide with surprise and pain yet unseeing. Then, as if being lowered by an unseen hand, the captain’s body collapsed to the floor, dragging three of the four men tied to him down as well. Yousef looked at his lifeless body, then stated as if the dead man could still hear him, “You should be grateful that I didn’t have an anthill and some honey.” Yousef’s men snickered as, once more, Yousef smiled broadly.

  *****

  At the gas terminal, the police had decided that negotiations were not working and they decided to take aggressive action, with the City of Hamburg’s SWAT team leading the offensive charge. First, six officers rushed up the gangway, resulting in four of the officers being shot and wounded in the legs—the only area not covered by their body armor. The other two officers escaped injury while climbing the gangway, only to have the lower half of their bodies shredded by the plastic projectiles embedded in the mines at the top of the gangway. When several more SWAT officers tried to come to their fallen comrades’ aid, they also were met with a blizzard of gunfire from the ship.

  Several more officers received wounds to their legs and were left to wither in the sun, while an alternative rescue plan was developed. The second assault involved the police trying to climb aboard the ship using grappling hooks and ropes from small boats on the canal side. They, too, were met with a blizzard of gun fire, forcing them to retreat after several officers had been shot and killed as they attempted to climb over the deck rail.

  Fifteen minutes passed before the police attempted a third assault. This time they sent in two helicopters and tried to have men fast rope down to the deck, while snipers in the choppers fired blindly on the ship’s bridge. Still other officers again rushed the gangway. This tactic seemed to have worked until the police sustained heavy casualties as the officers tripped the small anti-personnel mines that were spread across the main deck and at the entrances to the superstructure. In all, six more officers were killed and four more were wounded as the assault failed.

  The police manpower was becoming severely depleted with a dozen officers killed and a dozen more wounded, so they chose to wait for the military to arrive from a base forty kilometers south of Hanover. The military choppers loaded with troops began arriving ten minutes later than planned for by the terrorists and shortly after Yousef’s LNG tanker slipped past the terminal continuing upriver, starting the one hour countdown to denotation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Bill had spent his morning sorting files and collating them in an attempt to make sense of the mounds of data that the hacking programs were collecting. What had previously taken months to distill from raw data was now about to produce actionable results within weeks.

  He had started with the banking records of the members of the Brotherhood’s governments. He was more than a little surprised to find that the oil producing nations all received foreign aid from the United States, and even the nations that had been labeled as rogue nations or terrorist supporters received just as much or more than the other Middle Eastern nations not so designated. A quick mental calculation caused Bill to pull out a calculator to make sure his math was correct. It was.

  The government of the United States had paid to oil rich countries, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Libya, and Morocco, over twenty-five billion dollars to help build roads, schools, or to provide food and other humanitarian aid. The U.S. paid them to do these things while they controlled sixty-five percent of the world’s wealth, while their economic policies through OPEC drove the American economy into the ground. What the hell was going on?

  Bill called his staff and had them concentrate on finding all of the connections between the federal government and the Islamic nations. Something smelled very bad here, and he was going to get to the bottom of it. He then called Steven, and after a short wait he was connected.

  “Bill, what can I do for you?” Steven cheerfully answered the phone.

  “I wanted to give you a heads up about something that appears very promising,” Bill stated.

  “Oh?”

  “Okay, you know we’ve been gathering data about the worldwide movement of money. We’ve focused on the Brotherhood and their money movements, and as a sideline, we decided we would check out the home country of each of the main members.”

  “Okay,” Steven replied absent-mindedly as he checked over a file he was reading.

  “Yeah,” Bill continued, “what I found is very interesting. Did you know that our federal government pays out foreign aid to the oil rich nations to the tune of over twenty-five billion dollars annually? The Feds even pay countries like Libya, Syria and Iran big chunks of change, despite being on the international terrorism watch list and sworn enemies of our country.”

  Steven interrupted Bill at this point. “They what? How much?”

  “Well, Libya received the smallest amount of money at about one hundred and ten million between the State Department, CIA, Agriculture, and humanitarian aid. Then Syria received from State one hundred and twenty-five million and Iran received eight hundred million. They’ve got the money spread out over dozens of departments, so it’s a real challenge to put the total together.”

  “Jesus Christ! We’re giving aid to the enemy? How is this possible?” Steven asked.

  “I’m sure that some idiot had a perfectly good reason to give money to our enemies, but I can’t think of one. Maybe they thought it would buy peace or something,” Bill suggested.

  “Do we know how long they’ve been doing this?” Steven asked.

  “No, but I’ll get someone working on it right away.”

  “I know it might be far-fetched,” Steven mused as he thought the idea through, “but could they be using that money to pay for terror attacks against us?” Steven asked.

  “It really doesn’t matter if they use this exact money or not. By giving them the money, they are then free to spend money on terrorism that they would have needed to spend elsewhere. It’s blood money any way you look at it. We’re either paying them a bribe to try and keep oil prices as low as possible, or to stop attacks on Israel, or maybe even to stop piracy. I can’t say for sure, but I’ll have someone find out,” Bill stated.

  “Make this a priority, will you, because we need to know why we’re sending money to our enemies, what they do with it, and who benefits from the payments. Do you think we can find that out? I don’t mean just what
the press releases say, but what the real purpose is,” Steven said.

  “I don’t know about absolute proof, but we should be able to find plenty of very convincing circumstantial evidence,” Bill stated with authority.

  “All right. Go find us that info,” Steven ordered before hanging up. After he had done so, he walked out of the small anteroom where he had taken the call on the fourth floor of Kilauea’s headquarters in Richmond, Virginia, crossed the hallway, and entered a conference room to continue listening in on a progress report on the next big thing from Kilauea Corp.

  He crossed the room and stepped in close to watch a demonstration of the new personal computer filled with Kilauea’s software. The whole program had been in development less than three years, and with a few minor tweaks, it would be ready for the marketplace in the next sixty to ninety days.

  One of the tweaks was to add, buried deeply within the programming, subtle but effective code that would provide subliminal messages to the consumer, suggesting that they do the right thing and that those who did the right thing were the coolest of people. The software also taught the lesson that you should not steal or cheat. It went so far as to suggest that you should turn in anyone who did cheat. It also stated that the user needed to believe in hard work and doing a good job, to stay off drugs, and to save sex for marriage. It even invoked “God Bless America”; put man first, not animals; demand lower taxes, less government, better public education and better politicians through term limits; to be public servants as a second part-time career; don’t be a racist, don’t litter, don’t pollute the air or the water, demand that America stop buying foreign oil, and to have common sense environmental laws. It also enforced the message that it is your right to bear arms and speak freely, and suggested the United States drop out of the United Nations and kick the UN out of the United States.

  If it went according to plan, he would personally insert the hidden program on the final production master in just over a month. The computer itself would be available for the school shopping season in the late summer, although he was going to give a half-dozen computers to every school in America in an effort to kick start the new programing of America. His engineers were even finalizing a new operating system that could be installed on any computer by any manufacturer. It would be ready for the marketplace within the next two months. The new Kilauea personal computer was to be the lowest priced machine on the market with the largest number of features.

  The new personal computer had come about after he and Chip had discussed ways that someone could control a large population. Chip had shared that the U.S. military had extensive programs dealing with the development of a subliminal mind control program. After talking with Chip, Steve was convinced that it was happening right now, and he knew he was the only person on the planet who had a chance of counteracting it. There were dozens of suspects as to who would do such a thing. It had to be either someone in a high level government position or someone in a powerful industry position whose agenda was to destroy America. Someone had planted a Trojan horse in multiple computer operating systems. It had to have cost billions upon billions to change America’s thinking. Men like George Soros had that kind of money and influence. Plus, there was no end to the politicians who would love to have that kind of power. If you stopped and looked at how America has changed since the Internet had gone public and how the computer became a must-have home convenience, you couldn’t help but see the evidence. It was there if, you’d just look.

  Steven had looked and didn’t like what he had seen, so he was going to do his best to counter it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  Yousef!” Aijaz suddenly called out. Yousef, who had been standing in the corner staring into space, while contemplating his next move, jumped to attention. He immediately saw Aijaz’s finger pointing out the bridge windows at the police helicopters which had returned and were about to fly past the ship passed Neßsand Island. The island officially marked the start of the downtown Hamburg section of the river. The helicopters made one pass over the ship as they headed downriver but then quickly reversed course and passed alongside, where they took up hovering positions, keeping them off the portside bow with a clear line of sight to the ship’s bridge.

  Yousef and his men dropped to the floor just as two shots rang out, striking the back wall of the bridge—just inches from where they had stood a moment before. Two of Yousef’s men crawled to the portside bridge wing entrance and crept out just far enough to fire on the helicopters. The men worked in rotation taking one shot and then quickly ducking back inside the door to avoid any return fire from the choppers. Despite their efforts, the snipers on board the choppers were unabatedly bouncing rounds off the side of the superstructure and the back wall of the bridge. Yousef had Aijaz cut the ropes binding the hostages together and then forced the men to stand directly in front of him and Aijaz, providing a human shield from the snipers’ fire.

  As the hostages ducked and weaved, trying not get hit by the gunfire from the men in the helicopters, Yousef’s men continued to take poorly aimed pot shots through the doorways. One of Yousef’s men suddenly stopped firing and lay perfectly still in the doorway. Aijaz crawled over and, after a moment, signaled Yousef that he was dead. A police sniper had managed to shoot him in the head.

  Yousef ordered Aijaz to return to piloting the ship as it was slowing for its final anchorage point under the main bridges at the city center. Yousef then slipped over to the bridge wing door himself and ordered the other three men to stop firing. He then had them move further back into the bridge where the four of them waited, lying flat on the floor.

  The police helicopters continued to fire on the bridge of the ship until they realized that there was no return fire. Knowing they were rapidly closing in on the city center, a no fly zone due to the number of power lines and bridges in the area, they decided to make a move to end the situation.

  Sensing an advantage that they really didn’t have, the police in the helicopters signaled each other and began slowly slipping down the sides of the ship until they had reached a position opposite the bridge wing doors on both sides. When they stopped and began to settle into a hovering position again—exactly what Yousef had counted on—he and his men struck.

  Having lost track of the terrorists during the firefight, they assumed that when the return fire had ceased, it had meant that the terrorists were either dead or dying. If that were the case, they were in little danger as they closed on the ship to check it out. It was a fatal assumption. What they hadn’t seen or noticed until they stopped to hover was that Yousef and his men had purposely taken positions flanking the doors to bridge wings. This allowed them a clear field of fire and defensible positions from which to ambush the helicopters.

  Having reached the bridge wings and having brought their choppers to almost a hover, the pilot on the starboard side was the first to notice Yousef and his men, two on each side of the ship, tucked in on either side of the doorways, flat on the floor and in perfect firing positions. Despite reacting and instantly calling out, the pilot’s words died on his lips as Yousef and his men opened fire on the choppers with their assault rifles from just over sixty feet away.

  Yousef and his men killed both sharpshooters immediately, their bodies falling out of the helicopters and dangling at the end of their safety lines. This sudden change in the weight ratio caused the helicopters to be destabilized and wobble side-to-side, exposing the choppers’ interiors to the assault weapons fire. Under this exposure, the spotters on each helicopter were quickly wounded or killed, thus eliminating any possible return fire. The mechanical and electrical components, which ran across the rear passenger compartment ceiling, were raked with rounds. Several hydraulic and electrical lines were punctured, sparking small fires with no one left to battle them.

  With gray smoke billowing out of its open cargo doors, the helicopter on the portside peeled away from the ship, still under the withering fire of the assault rifles. The helicopter on the star
board side fell away at a sharp downward angle, its tail rotor slamming into the superstructure below the deck before it dove straight into the river off of Cranz. It sank quickly without any signs of survivors. The chopper on the portside managed to make landfall in Blankenesse, before dropping straight down onto a house, where it burst into flames, igniting fires at several different homes as burning shrapnel bombarded the neighborhood.