Death Ship

by Joseph Badal

  From his front passenger seat, Michael looked in the Humvee’s side view mirror and saw a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in its bed pointed at his vehicle. There were at least half-a-dozen armed tribesmen in the pickup. A second later, the machine gunner and the other fighters opened up. Several rounds pierced the rear of the vehicle and tore through the front windshield. The DELTA trooper in the rear of the Humvee cried out, “Sonofabitch! I’m hit!”

  “Go! Go! Go!” Michael shouted at his driver, who slammed the transmission into Drive, pounded the accelerator to the floor, and roared down the curving road toward the heart of the village.

  On the comnet, Michael yelled, “We’re taking fire from a vehicle on our six. The only way out is through the center of the village. Red Dogs Two and Four, go back into the village and take out the vehicles in front of you. Do not let them move into the village square. As soon as you neutralize them, back out and circle to Red Dog Three’s location. Red Dog Three, stay alert. Cover us as we exit the village at your position.” If we exit the village, Michael thought.

  The Red Dog One Humvee tore through the village under a constant hail of gunfire. The twists and turns in the dirt road made sighting the pickup difficult. But they also prevented the fighters in the truck from getting good shots at the Humvee.

  Two hundred yards ahead, the mosque’s minaret came into clear view. Michael stared up at the top of the sleek structure and saw movement there. Then a man thrust what appeared to be an RPG launcher from the opening. Michael shouted at the Afghani machine gunner behind him, “Take out the man in the minaret.”

  “It is not allowed,” the man shouted back. “The minaret is holy ground.”

  “Sonofa—” Michael muttered. He leaned out from his seat, pointed his M4 at the top of the minaret, and fired off three short bursts. Puffs of white smoke appeared on the side of the structure as the M4 rounds stitched their way upward to just below the opening at the top. The Humvee bounced on the rough dirt road and careened around the turns, making it difficult for Michael to get a bead on the target.

  Just ahead was the intersection with the north/south road. The mosque was fifty yards beyond. Michael heard the unmistakable sounds of M4 and heavy weapons firing. Red Dog teams Two and Four had obviously engaged the enemy fighters in the pickup trucks parked on the north/south lanes. He guessed the man with the rocket launcher was leading his Humvee with his weapon and would fire at any moment.

  “Slow down,” Michael shouted at the driver.

  “What?” the man said. “Those men behind us—”

  “Slow down just before the intersection. Just until you see the pickup in your mirror. Then take a hard left turn at the intersection.”

  “General—”

  “Do what I told you.”

  The driver muttered something in Pashtu, slowed the vehicle, waited a few seconds, and then gunned the engine. The Humvee’s rear tires lost traction for a moment, then bit into the dirt and leaped forward. The driver seemed to hold the steering wheel in a death grip as he sped into the intersection and then viciously turned the wheel left. Michael heard the roar of heavy machine gun fire from the truck behind them. Everything seemed to ratchet down into slow motion. The machine gun rounds impacted the wall of a building across the intersection and then a bright light flashed somewhere off to his right, up high. He heard the sound and felt the concussion of a huge explosion behind him. Then, amidst all the noise and confusion, he felt the sat phone on his hip vibrate. He reached for the device and then withdrew his hand. Whatever it was could wait.

  The driver goosed the Red Dog One Humvee down the south road and, fifty yards onto the road, had to brake before a blind curve. As he entered the curve, he jammed both feet onto the vehicle’s brake pedal and skidded to a stop inches from a pickup truck. Black smoke and flames billowed from the vehicle. Bodies littered the ground around the truck and hung over the sides of the vehicle’s bed. Twenty-five yards further along the road were dismounted Afghani Army Rangers and one of Michael’s DELTA troops from the Red Dog Four Humvee.

  “Back this thing up,” Michael ordered. Then he said over the comnet, “Red Dog units, status reports.”

  “Red Dog Two; enemy neutralized; one dead; one wounded.”

  “Red Dog Three; no enemy contact.”

  “Red Dog Four; enemy neutralized; one wounded.”

  “This is Red Dog One,” Michael said. “We’ll back up and then take the road through the village to the west entrance. All teams rendezvous there.”

  The driver of the Red Dog One Humvee backed into the intersection and stared for a moment at the bent and burning wreckage of a pickup truck twenty yards away. He looked over at Michael and shook his head. “That was meant for us, General.”

  “Hold up a second,” Michael said. He ignored the wild expression on the driver’s face.

  “Hold up a second?” the driver said, his voice now several octaves higher than usual.

  “Yeah, just for a moment.” Michael turned and looked at the wounded DELTA soldier. “You okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You want to hand me that grenade launcher?”

  The wounded man passed the launcher to Michael, who took it, stepped from the vehicle, and pointed the weapon at the top of the minaret. The man with the rocket launcher was clearly visible there and appeared to be ready to fire another rocket. Michael sighted in on the opening and fired a grenade round. The round struck the tower just below the opening and scored the minaret’s surface. The man with the rocket launcher disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, shouldered his weapon, and pointed it down at the Humvee just as Michael fired off a second grenade round that arced toward the top of the minaret, dropped through the opening, and exploded.

  Michael re-entered the Humvee and said, “We can go now.”

  The driver breathlessly said something that sounded to Michael like a prayer as he drove through the square.

  “Eyes on the roofs,” Michael shouted. He guessed that if there were armed men on the roofs, they would be between the square and the west side of the village, where he and his convoy were originally supposed to enter. A quarter mile past the square, small arms fire rained down on the Red Dog One Humvee. The chatter of the Americans’ M2 and M240B machine guns was deafening as they strafed the top edges of the buildings, but they were too few to suppress all the fire from the men above them. Rounds crashed against the vehicle and pierced the roof, windshield, and side windows. The driver screamed when a bullet hit his left arm and blood splashed the inside of the Humvee. Michael grabbed the steering wheel as the vehicle careened to the left.

  “I have it, General,” the driver shouted as he gripped the wheel with his right hand and righted the vehicle. The machine gunner cried out and then went silent. A second later, a round sliced through Michael’s side, just below his right armpit.

  Michael and the wounded DELTA soldier fired a massive volume of rounds back at the rooftops, but with little effect. It seemed that every time one of the enemy fighters went down, two popped up to take his place.

  Michael knew they were in even more trouble than they had been a couple minutes earlier. He considered ordering the driver to crash the Humvee through the front wall of a building to get them off the road, out of the line of fire, when he heard the unmistakable whup-whup-whup sounds of Black Hawks. Apparently, the fighters on the rooftops heard the choppers, too, because they suddenly ceased firing on the Humvee. Then the sounds from the choppers’ rotors beating against the air—a sound Michael found sweeter than any music he’d ever heard—became deafening, followed immediately by the roar of the aircrafts’ Gatling guns and explosions caused by its missiles launched at the rooftops. The choppers made two passes over the village as Michael’s driver drove at breakneck speed toward the west end of Sultanmaneh.

  The Red Dog One Humvee reached the end of the village as Michael received a radio transmission from one of the helicopter pilots: “Enemy fighters neutralized. Have a nice ri
de home, boys.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Tanya Serkovic had not appointed a new leader of the Operation Lone Wolf Department after Bob Danforth successfully managed the department’s defeat of the Black Gold Brotherhood two years earlier. With what Jack Cole had just told her about the situation off Sicily, she now wished she’d found someone to lead the department. For a moment, she felt awful about what she was about to do, but the mission came first. She picked up the receiver from the secure telephone on her desk and dialed the number of Major General Declan Richter, Michael Danforth’s DELTA commander.

  “We must have a problem, Tanya,” Richter said.

  “Correct, Deck. Good guess.”

  “No guess. Since when do you call me to shoot the breeze?”

  “You have a point.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Three men hijacked a luxury boat in the Ionian. They were equipped with assault weapons, a satellite phone, and detonators. The men who took over the boat were English speaking, one supposedly from the U.K., the other two from the United States. But there’s a possibility they’re originally from someplace else.” Tanya hesitated and then added, “I think we should send in a Lone Wolf DELTA team with interrogation specialists fluent in Farsi and Arabic.”

  “Why those languages?”

  “Because of the detonators, we should assume we’re dealing with terrorists. Just playing the odds.”

  “What’s the source of your information?”

  “One of our former employees was aboard the hijacked yacht.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Bob Danforth.”

  “I thought he retired.”

  “He did. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She took a deep breath. “What if we sent in General Danforth and a team?”

  “No can do. Mike’s in Afghanistan. He won’t be back for another week. Besides, I don’t make a habit of sending general officers on field operations.”

  “Why’s he in Afghanistan, then?”

  “Fact finding.”

  “I think you might want to recall him. If you don’t, you’ll have a very pissed off guy on your hands. I know you outrank him, but that won’t mean squat to him when he learns his father, mother, wife, and son were almost killed by terrorists and you kept him out of the action.”

  Richter said, “I’ll be in touch.”

  Tanya called her top two subordinates, Frank Reynolds and Raymond Gallegos. She’d inherited them from Bob Danforth and had transferred them to the National Clandestine Service after she took over there. They had been vital to the Company’s success with numerous operations, most recently with the defeat of the Black Gold Brotherhood. Earlier, while she worked for Bob, they had all been part of the same team and were integral to the success of Operation Icon in Iran and, before that, to the defeat of the terrorist group, Greek Spring, in Greece.

  Fifty-six-year-old Reynolds, a bookish thirty-three-year CIA veteran, with an IQ in the stratosphere, had spent much of his career with the Company analyzing intelligence product. He also had extensive experience in the development and management of special operations. The Company had sent him to study Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, and Greek at the Defense Language Institute, West Coast in Monterey, California, and had paid for him to earn his doctorate of Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He knew more about the political systems and parties in the entire region than anyone in the free world. Over the past couple years, he’d also built expertise about Iran’s governmental organizational structure and its intelligence operations around the world. He concentrated on the Middle East after the CIA’s Special Activities Division and its Special Operations Group got involved in the Operation Icon investigation. He now headed up the Special Activities Division. Frank’s wiry salt and pepper hair, as usual, looked as though it had never known a comb.

  Raymond Gallegos was forty-seven years old and had the dark, good looks of a Latin movie star and the intelligence of a nuclear physicist. A highly decorated Army veteran with three years in Special Forces, he’d earned his Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Geography after a tour in the first Gulf War, and spent seven years with the National Security Agency as a cartography expert, before he moved to the CIA. He was familiar with every part of Southern Europe and the Middle East the way most people know their own neighborhoods. He now served as Director of the Special Operations Group (SOG) and reported to Frank.

  Tanya brought Frank and Raymond up-to-date on the situation in the Ionian and noted each of them smiled when she mentioned Bob Danforth’s involvement.

  Tanya said, “Frank, we need to liaise with NRO and NSA.” She looked at Raymond. “You’re the perfect person to deal with them because of your time at NSA.”

  Frank nodded. “I agree.”

  Tanya said, “We need to know if the NSA recorded calls from the terrorists’ sat phone. We don’t have a lot of time before 11:30 p.m., Sicily-time, when Bob believes the hijackers might be scheduled to check in again with their headquarters. I need a plan. Do we make a call to the number Bob gave us off that sat phone? If so, what do we say? If we do make a call, can we trace it to the receiving phone?”

  Frank said, “You’ll have an ops plan on your desk within the hour.”

  “Frank, I want you to personally coordinate with Major General Richter down at Central Command. Let me know if he assigns Michael Danforth to lead a Lone Wolf Team on this operation. A team needs to be on site in the Ionian as quickly as possible.”

  “If Mike’s in Afghanistan, I’m sure Richter has other teams available.”

  “I prefer to have Michael on this mission.”

  “Why is that—?” Frank stopped and then raised his eyebrows. “Oh, I see. You want Bob to take an interest.”

  Tanya felt her face go warm. She cleared her throat and said, “I suggest you find an interrogator fluent in Arabic and Farsi who can be dropped onto Sicily.”

  “I’ve got an undercover agent on the ground in Berlin,” Raymond said. “She’s on the Gerhardt Anlageberatungs operation there. Native Farsi speaker and speaks fluent Arabic.”

  “Good. But what will happen if she drops out of sight for a few days? I’d hate to blow the operation there.”

  Raymond rubbed his forehead. After a few seconds, he said, “Her parents live in Beverly Hills. They’re loyal Americans now. We’ll see if one of them would be willing to fake an illness. That would give my agent cause to take a few days off.”

  “Do it,” Tanya said.

  CHAPTER 18

  Early on the morning of her fifth birthday in 1990, black-haired, green-eyed Laila Farhami and her parents boarded a small commuter plane from Teheran, Iran to Tabriz, in the northwest part of the country. Her father and mother, both hospital-based physicians, had been selected to attend a medical conference. Laila’s paternal grandparents lived in Tabriz and would have the opportunity to spend time with their granddaughter while her parents worked. On the evening of the conference’s last day, Laila’s father drove his parents, wife, and daughter to a barren, mountainous area near the Iranian border with Turkey. Laila’s father pressed twenty one-hundred American dollar bills into the hand of a bearded Iranian border guard who bowed to the doctor and walked away until the Farhamis had crossed into Turkey. Two months later, the Farhamis resettled in Beverly Hills, California.

  Laila had inherited her mother’s almond-shaped, green eyes, full lips, and straight nose. From her father, she acquired a short, slim stature and an olive complexion. She became a brilliant student and learned from her immigrant parents to love the United States of America. Laila graduated at the top of her class from Beverly Hills High School, subsequently earned degrees in finance from Stanford University and The Wharton School and, after graduation, fully intended to work on Wall Street. But a recruiter from the CIA completely turned her thinking around when she knocked on Laila’s Philadelphia apartment door one evening and asked, “How would you feel about working for the
United States government?”

  “Doing what?” she’d asked.

  “A variety of things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Helping us to undermine the Islamic regime in Iran?”

  Laila went through the CIA training program, which included a stint at the Farm in Virginia. She also spent forty-seven weeks at the Defense Language Institute, West Coast, where she studied Gulf Arabic and was Honor Graduate. Now in her fifth year with the Company, Laila had worked on assignment for the past two years as a trader with Gerhardt Anlageberatungs, an investment advisory company in Berlin. The firm had thousands of clients throughout Europe and the Middle East. But, by far, its largest client was Saber Commodities, an investment company with over seven billion Euros under management at GA. The CIA first took an interest in Gerhardt Anlageberatungs when its post 9/11 investigation turned up evidence that on September 25, 2001, the firm unwound several huge short positions in insurance and reinsurance company stocks. In every case, the companies invested in had huge exposure to United States commercial buildings in New York City, including a significant piece of the insurance coverage held on the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Gerhardt Anlageberatungs had taken out the short positions two weeks before the 9/11 attacks.

  In partnership with the NSA, the FBI, the SEC, and the Treasury Department, the CIA headed up a team that tracked every new trade GA executed after September 25, 2001, with special attention paid to short sales. It didn’t take long for the task force to notice a pattern of trades executed anywhere from two days to two weeks before terrorist attacks occurred. The investment advisory firm made short sale transactions on foreign stock exchanges in insurance and reinsurance company stocks just before numerous terrorist attacks transpired, including attacks on a ferry in the Philippines, a hotel in Mumbai, and several sites in Nigeria. The firm also took short positions on insurance company stocks before failed or aborted terrorist incidents in London, Madrid, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. In nearly every instance where GA took a short position in an insurance or reinsurance company, a terrorist incident occurred or was thwarted. And, in every instance, insurance and reinsurance company stock prices dropped precipitously. As a result, GA reaped billions.