The Socotra Incident

by Richard Fox

  THE SOCOTRA INCIDENT

  An Eric Ritter Military Thriller

  By

  Richard Fox

  Text copyright © 2015 Richard R Fox

  All Rights Reserved

  To my wife and children

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 1

  2009

  Ilyas kept his eyes on his prey as their speedboat tore through the waves. One hand gripped the stock of the AK-47 slung over his chest; the other held onto the splintered wood of the speedboat with white-knuckle intensity. The man at the engine, Guleed, gunned the engine and sent the speedboat through the top of a whitecap. The craft dropped through three feet of air and slammed into the sea.

  “Take it easy, or we’re going to swim home!” Ogaal yelled over the roar of the engine and wind. Guleed shrugged and spat a glob of khat juice at Ogaal. Ogaal choked down a mouthful of bile and put his head between his legs.

  Ilyas shook his head in disappointment at the seasick pirate. The two other armed Somalis inched away from Guleed as he dry heaved—not that they’d find much sanctuary on a boat that could barely hold five men.

  Their target, a two-hundred-foot fishing boat, came in and out of view as the speedboat worked through the chop. Two large booms meant to trawl fishing nets from the boat’s sides remained visible over the surf, making Ilyas’s job as the spotter all too easy.

  “Turn into the wake!” Ilyas yelled.

  Guleed jerked the rudder and pivoted the speedboat into the churning water flagging behind the trawler. With the rising sun at their backs and the smooth water to guide them in, the angle of attack was perfect.

  The fishing boat had seen better days. Barnacles rose and dipped into view as the waterline shifted with the waves. Wide patches of rust scabs marred a whitewash that probably hadn’t been refreshed in years. The painted Philippine flag looked new, at least. The lack of gulls and the high level of freeboard told Ilyas that this boat had an empty hold, which suited him just fine. There would be no smell of dead fish to deal with once the boat was theirs.

  Ilyas rose to a half crouch and aimed his rifle at the railing across the stern of the boat. No crewmen stood watch in the early morning light. There was no sign of anyone on the boat readying flares or fire hoses—or scrambling for a safe room. There was no one to repel boarders.

  “Get the grappling hook,” Ilyas said. An iron hook scraped against the wood as Ogaal picked up the grappling hook.

  “Closer!” Ogaal said as a swell shoved the speedboat away. Guleed revved the engine, and the speedboat crept back toward the trawler. Ogaal twirled the grapple at the end of a nylon line and hurled the pig iron hook with a grunt.

  The hook soared through the air and bounced against the hull with a hollow clang.

  Ilyas whirled around and smacked the back of his hand against Ogaal’s face as a chorus of curses and insults rose from the rest of the pirates.

  “Idiot! Now they know we’re here. Waris, get the hook,” Ilyas said. Waris, a good six inches taller and ten years older than Ogaal, drew in the line to the hook with a fisherman’s ease.

  Ilyas turned his attention back to the trawler. A light snapped on in the forecastle.

  Waris threw the hook over the railing with ease and found purchase immediately. Waris and Ogaal pulled their speedboat against the hull of the trawler moments later.

  The last pirate, Arale, lifted an aluminum ladder, with hooks jerry-rigged onto the end, and attached it to the railing.

  “Go! Go!” Ilyas ordered.

  Ogaal slung an AK-47 over his shoulder and scurried up the ladder. As the youngest member of the crew, he had the honor of taking the first bullet the trawler’s crew might offer in resistance.

  Ilyas followed, the aluminum rungs biting through the soles of his decrepit sandals. His calloused hands slipped against the cold metal as sea spray covered the ladder. He looked up and saw Ogaal slither over the top rung. The ladder shifted in the air despite Guleed’s best efforts to hold the base against the gunnels of the speedboat.

  He made it to within arm’s reach of the railing when the trawler’s engine rumbled. Ilyas scrambled to the top as if it had suddenly caught fire and fell onto the deck. The AK broke his fall, driving the metal nub of the charging handle into his chest.

  Shouts of panic came from the two men following Ilyas up the ladder as the trawler’s engine went full speed ahead. Ilyas watched as the ladder’s angle against the side of the boat increased as the trawler pulled away. The speedboat and trawler veered apart and the base of the ladder slipped over the side of the pirate boat. The ladder swung free and ladder slammed into the side of the boat.

  Ilyas looked over the side; Waris and Arale clung to the ladder like terrified children clutching a parent. The uncaring ocean churned beneath them.

  “Help them,” Ilyas said to Ogaal. Ogaal reached through the railing and held the ladder against the hull with all the might his skinny limbs could muster.

  A door on the forecastle swung open, and a man wearing nothing more than boxer shorts burst through the opening. The man, squat and nearly hairless, wasn’t dressed for a fight, but he carried a belt-fed PK machine gun, the big brother to Ilyas’s AK-47.

  Ilyas wasted no time with threats or demands. He thumbed the selector switch on his rifle to auto and fired from the hip. The first rounds sparked off the deck and past the man with the machine gun. The kick from the weapon pulled the barrel up and to the right, stitching bullets from the deck up the side of the forecastle.

  Two rounds hit the defender, who doubled over and fell to the deck without a sound, crumpled over his weapon. Ilyas aimed his rifle into the open door and glanced over his shoulder. Waris had made it onto the fishing boat; spent shells rolled around his feet as he fumbled with his rifle. For all his years of piracy, Ilyas had never seen a crew armed with a PK machine gun, a weapon rarely seen outside of state armies…and pirates. Undamaged, it would make a nice addition to his crew.

  “Come with me,” Ilyas said. He didn’t wait to see whether Waris followed him as he bounded across the deck, his feet splashing through rusty puddles.

  Blood pooled from the lone defender; his face lay in his own vital fluid. Ilyas pointed his weapon at the body as he passed it, his eyes darting from the body to the darkness beyond the open door and back.

  He stepped over the bulkhead and into the forecastle. A metal staircase led up to the bridge on the next level. Ilyas kept his rifle pointed upward and took the stairs two at a time. Men shouted at each other from the bridge.

  Ilyas stepped onto the bridge and shouted, “Kamay!” over and over as he swung the muzzle of his weapon from side to side. His Filipino was rough, but the bridge crew should have gotten the idea to raise their hands.

  Half a dozen men clustered around the helm and computer screens at the front of the bridge. The men had dark hair, broad faces, and Asian features. Ilyas hadn’t traveled far beyond the Horn of Africa and Yemen in his life, but he knew these men weren’t Filipino. Most raised their hands and cast furtive glances at the one man who didn’t obey.

  The lone holdout had a satellite phone to his ear, rambling in a language foreign to Ilyas. The talker looked like the rest of the crew and wasn’t a Westerner that shipping and fishing corporations hired as senior crew members. As such, the man on the phone probably wasn’t worth much of a ransom to Ilyas.

  Ilyas aimed down the sites of his rifle and fired a single round. The bullet shattered the satellite phone and passed through the talker’s skull
, splattering skull and gray matter against the window behind him.

  The crew started babbling; one man fell to his knees and held his hands out to Ilyas, begging.

  “Out! Out!” Ilyas yelled. He motioned to the hatch with his rifle and stepped aside to let the crew pass him, well beyond arm’s length. Waris barked orders at the crew as they clambered down the steps like chastened sheep.

  Ilyas waited for the last one to pass into Waris’s keeping, then turned his attention to the bridge. He found the engine controls and killed the engines. They’d need Guleed and the speedboat for a quick getaway if a warship was in range of any mayday the crew had managed to broadcast.

  He found the Automatic Identification System (AIS), used by maritime traffic for tracking the location and heading of vessels, screwed into the bulkhead. He was about to smash it with the butt of his rifle when he noticed it wasn’t even turned on. Ilyas shook his head; navigating ocean lanes without AIS was like driving on a busy highway at night with no lights on. He smashed it with the butt of his rifle. There was no need to risk anyone figuring out where this boat was until he or she was ready to pay for it.

  The radio station was silent, the hand mike resting in the receiver. This was the eighth time he’d stepped onto a captured bridge, and every time the crew managed to get a distress call out, there was someone on the other end of the radio demanding more information. He kicked at the shattered satellite phone in the corpse’s twitching hand; it was just as dead as its owner. Why make a call to one person who might not answer when a radio broadcast would reach every ship for a hundred miles?

  “Nothing about this ship makes sense,” he said. He started to think this prize wasn’t worth the effort.

  He heard two bangs of a rifle butt on the forecastle, then three more after a pause. He was needed.

  Ilyas stepped over the body and made his way back to the deck. The fishermen were on their knees, hands behind their heads, while Waris and Arale kept watch over them. Arale had a cheek full of khat, his jaw working overtime to chew the narcotic leaf.

  Ogaal stood at a hatch leading into the hold, waving at Ilyas for attention.

  One of the prisoners was speaking to the rest in a low voice. Might be a prayer. Might not.

  “Shut him up,” Ilyas said as he walked past. Arale snapped a kick into the talker’s head and follow up with a stomp on the man’s kidneys. There was no protest from the rest of the prisoners.

  “Boss, come see!” Ogaal said as Ilyas followed him into the hold.

  A fishing boat should have reeked with the ghosts of thousands of dead fish, no matter how well or how often the hold was scrubbed out. This ship was pristine, a slight smell of bleach in the air. A new coat of white paint gleamed under the florescent lights running along the ceiling.

  There was no cargo anywhere in the hold, not even a shipment of ice to chill a catch he could sell back in his home port of Eyl. There was no Western hostage to ransom. No cargo to plunder. He doubted he could even sell this ship to a dealer in Yemen. The only thing this ship offered was a small room, made with steel walls that sat in the middle of the hold. A single double-wide door, slightly ajar, was the only way into the room.

  “This had better be good, Ogaal.”

  Ogaal ran to the door and heaved it open a bit more, his scrawny limbs straining against the weight. Ilyas ran his hand against the side of the door as it swept past him. Six inches of bare metal lay beneath the whitewashed steel. If the compartment inside was meant to be a safe room for the crew, it was much too small to hold all of them at once.

  Ilyas flicked on a light switch in the room, illuminating a cramped chamber that held nothing but a green case, a yard long and a foot wide, on a steel shelf. Ilyas disengaged the latches on the case and struggled to lift the lid open. Why was it so damn heavy?

  The lid bounced against the hinges as momentum took it away from him; a yellow and black tri-foil on the underside of the lid warned of radiation danger. Script in a language he didn’t recognize ran up and down the underside of the lid beside the warning symbol. Ilyas looked at the contents in silence. A metallic sphere suspended in a frame, wires equidistant over the surface, was either a demon or his salvation

  A camera flashed behind him. Ogaal had his cell phone out, a giant grin on his face.

  “Are we rich?” Ogaal asked.

  Ilyas was about to force-feed that cell phone to Ogaal when machine gunfire erupted from the deck. Ogaal turned and ran out of the hold without prompting.

  The firing had ceased by the time Ilyas made it back into the open air. All the prisoners lay in a heap of bodies; one writhed against the edge of the deck, his hands over the bloody mess that remained of his stomach.

  Arale was hunched over Waris, who lay on his side, moaning, as he cupped his hands around his groin. Smoke seeped from Arale’s barrel.

  “One of those Philipinos hit Waris in the balls and got his gun,” Arale said, his words garbled by the khat in his mouth.

  Ilyas shoved the surviving crewman onto his back with his foot. Ilyas looked down at the dying man and shook his head.

  “You’re not from the Philippines, are you?” he asked.

  The crewman whimpered, “Balabnida. Apayo.”

  “If you insist.” Ilyas bent over, grabbed the man by his shirt, and tipped him over the gunwale. There was a perfunctory scream and a splash as the sea took him. Ilyas didn’t bother to see whether the crewman managed to make it back to the surface.

  “Get rid of the bodies. We need to get this boat to Somalia.”

  Chapter 2

  One Week Later

  Natalie Davis splashed cold water against her face and looked up into the bathroom mirror. The florescent lights made her look like she hadn’t slept in days, which wasn’t that far from the truth. She stuck out her lower lip and exhaled slowly.

  “Come on, Natalie. All you have to do is get off the plane and go through customs. Just like any normal person,” she said to herself. Her reflection didn’t look convinced.

  Her training had hammered proper border crossings over and over again. Be nonchalant, know your cover story backward and forward, and never, ever, panic. Good spies won’t get caught at border crossings. Trust your backstop. The fake identity and history were put together by the best spies in the business.

  The butterflies in her stomach didn’t seem to give a damn about the instructor’s platitudes.

  A seat belt sign lit up with a chime. Instructions in German and English urged her back to her seat for the final approach into Vienna International Airport.

  Natalie patted her cheeks with her fingers and shook her head from side to side. A trick her mother had taught her to clear her mind.

  “Hi, my name is Natalie Garrow. I work for Eisen Meer Logistics,” she said. She repeated the words as a quiet mantra. “Garrow”—that was the name on every piece of identification she carried. She wasn’t First Lieutenant Natalie Davis, US Army, anymore. Now she was a fresh-faced MBA with way too much college debt and a skimpy résumé.

  Natalie opened the bathroom door and found a frumpy, apple-shaped woman waiting on her.

  “Sorry,” Natalie said with a smile as she slipped past the woman.

  “Fräulein.”

  The woman handed Natalie’s Prada purse back to her before closing the bathroom door. Natalie’s face flushed. The only thing worse than leaving your ID unattended for foreign intelligence services to peruse was to lose it. Natalie clasped the purse against her chest and slipped back into her seat.

  The Austrians will make me persona non grata before I even get off this plane, she thought.

  She started filling out the customs form left in her seat back and corrected herself. She wasn’t traveling as a diplomat with the State Department. There was no diplomatic immunity to hide behind if she screwed up and got caught. She was an NOC, a Nonofficial Cover officer, and if caught, she could bank on a nice prison cell and a “never heard of her” write-off from the US government.

 
; The lush countryside and impeccably maintained highways of Austria gave way to clusters of suburbs as the plane descended into Vienna. Her seatmate snorted and stirred under his blanket. The octogenarian had opted to sleep the entire flight, which suited Natalie just fine.

  The plane landed minutes later, and Natalie slipped her customs declaration into the leather case holding her passport and credit cards. The Visa Black Card and American Express Platinum card, made from titanium, stared back at her. High-end credit cards weren’t unusual for a business traveler, but the unlimited line of credit with each card was damn peculiar for a CIA officer.

  Screwing up expense reports was the number one reason officers lost their clearance and, by immediate correlation, their jobs. When her handler gave her the cards and her identity documents in the Prada handbag, she’d almost asked for something a little ostentatious. Carrying tens of thousands of dollars in personal liability struck her as a bit cruel and unusual for a shiny, new officer like herself. The handler just laughed at her, which didn’t help her confidence. She’d consoled herself that the purse was probably fake.

  Her business class cabin let out, and she gave a polite “Bu-bye now” to the stewardesses at the exit.

  She extended the handle on her carry-on and made her way toward customs, her shoulders back, chin up, and tendrils of fear snaking through her chest. She wanted to rehearse her backstory and have all the details of her trip on the tip of her tongue for the customs inspectors, but her mind was full of static.

  There’d be a line at screening, she told herself. A chance to center herself.

  Her heart skipped a beat as she came around a corner and found empty lines leading to plenty of available customs agents. Business class had a disadvantage her training hadn’t anticipated. She considered ducking into a restroom to buy time, but an agent waved her over. So much for that idea.

  Natalie’s throat tightened as she walked up to the slight woman sitting at a desk surrounded by Plexiglas. The agent had a severe face and hair wrapped into a tiny bun behind her head. Natalie slid her passport and customs slip into the aluminum-lined depression beneath the Plexiglas and managed to smile.