As the sound of the explosions died away, it was replaced by the whine of jet turbines as the helicopter scrambled steeply upwards from the heli-deck. As it climbed higher, the Weapons Officer switched on the long-range, high definition image intensifier. As soon as the target mother-ship was in sight, the images were relayed back to the operations room on the Shaheen.
When the trawler was in range the WO fired off an air-to-surface guided missile which he skilfully caused to land in the sea a handful of metres in front of his target. The waterspout from the missile soaked the trawler from stem to stern, and watching on the screen on the Al Shaheen, Harper and the others could see the resulting panic breaking out. They watched the terrified crew attempting to abandon ship, fighting each other to clamber aboard the remaining attack craft that were moored alongside.
To speed their departure, the WO fired off a second missile and this one struck the trawler with a blinding flash just behind the bow. As metal fragments spattered down around the mother-ship, things on the vessel turned really nasty, with one man using his weapon to shoot everyone in his path as he ran towards one of the attack-craft. He then killed a couple of the crew who were already on board with the engines running, gunned the boat and sped off, bouncing over the waves and leaving the remaining crew to their fate.
‘That’s the man we want,’ Laiya said, ‘that’s the bastard Moussa. Don’t lose him on the imager.’
While Moussa headed for the shore at top speed, his surviving men scrambled for the one remaining attack craft. Under orders from Laiya, the Al Shaheen’s Weapons Officer held off further fire until the attack craft had cast off from the mother-ship. It was so overloaded that waves were almost lapping over the gunwales of the craft and it made ponderous progress towards the shore. Laiya waited until it was a couple of hundred metres clear of the mother-ship before giving the order to resume fire. Two further missile strikes then hit the abandoned mother-ship. The first, just aft of the bridge, blew out part of the hull. The second, penetrating the engine room, caused a huge explosion that broke the ship’s back. It slowly settled in the water, listing further and further to one side, then turned turtle and sank. Geysers of water and steam erupted around the stricken ship and when they cleared, it had disappeared from sight, leaving only pieces of debris and a widening oil slick to mark where it had been only moments before.
Harper barely noticed the disappearance of the mother-ship, all his attention focussed on the screen tracking Moussa’s craft to the shore. He roared through the shallows and ploughed a furrow into the white sand as he beached his craft and abandoned it, his feet floundering in the soft sand as he ran up the beach and through the village. By now it was late afternoon and the pictures from the helicopter were being compromised by the setting sun, but Harper was able to make out just enough detail to see Moussa enter the single-storey complex of buildings which they had already identified as his headquarters.
‘Right,’ Harper said. ‘We’ve got him hauled up and gone to ground, so we go ashore at midnight, lie up around the target and go in at first light to finish the job. Remember everyone in the village will be armed and they will fight to defend the man, if only because he bankrolls the whole area. So we go in quick, do the job, create a diversion and then get out, but most important of all, nobody gets left behind.’
Just before midnight, dressed in wet-suits, Harper, Laiya and the rest of the attack team transferred to the Al Shaheen’s landing craft. It cast off from the yacht and moved silently through the water towards the shore. In the darkness, its low hull would have been almost invisible to any but the most alert watcher on the coast. The attackers slipped over the side a couple of hundred metres from the shore, where the breaking surf was just visible as a faintly phosphorescent line. They swam the rest of the way in their wet-suits, towing their kit in waterproof bags behind them, and arrived with barely a noise or a ripple on the shore.
After checking out the area around the landing point, they readied themselves for battle. Harper could smell wood smoke from a couple of smouldering fires drifting on the breeze but the village was still and silent, and in complete darkness. Wearing Passive Night Goggles and moving in diamond formation, they navigated their way up the beach and then slipped silently between the houses, using the shadows and every scrap of cover. Quiet as they were, their movements set stray dogs to howling in the darkness. The noise echoed around the attack team, jangling Harper’s nerves.
They took up their planned positions around the target: a cluster of outbuildings occupied by the rest of Moussa’s gang-members. It formed a defensive perimeter around the house at the core of the complex that was Moussa’s headquarters. Although more substantial than the palm-thatched mud-brick dwellings in the rest of the village, the outbuildings’ walls of brick and breeze-blocks were unlikely to be much of a barrier to the powerful explosive charges the attackers carried. Through his night vision goggles, Harper could see that a couple of sentries had been posted on the roof of the complex but both of them were sound asleep.
Even for the most experienced combat troops, the period of waiting before an attack was launched was always the most difficult time, but Harper was impressed by the patience shown by the Saudis. They remained on hyper-alert but silent and motionless as the dark hours of the night slowly passed.
As the sun at last began to rise, putting a little warmth back into their chilled bones, Harper stole out of cover, approached the outbuilding that barred the way to Moussa’s house and fixed a frame charge onto the wall of one of the buildings.
He muttered ‘Standby, Standby,’ into his throat microphone and then initiated the five second fuse. The charge went off with a muffled bang, imploding the wall into the building. The over-pressure caused by the blast killed everyone inside, bursting their lungs within their chests, and sent one of the sleeping sentries on the roof plunging to his death.
Without waiting to check the carnage, Harper led the way through the gap the blast had caused in the walls, followed by Laiya and two of the other Saudis, while the rest of the attack team remained outside, guarding the perimeter, killing the remaining sentry on the roof and exchanging fire with several villagers who had been woken by the blast and were now firing off bursts from their AK-47s. However their firing was wild and uncoordinated and little threat to the disciplined, aimed bursts of the Saudi attackers. They picked off a group of villagers who were attempting to launch a frontal assault on the attackers and any others who showed themselves for more than a split second found themselves coming under a deadly, withering fire.
Inside the compound, Harper kicked down the door of Moussa’s HQ building, tossed a flash-bang through the doorway and followed it a heartbeat later, diving, rolling and coming up firing. Two of Moussa’s bodyguards died instantly as Harper led Laiya and the other Saudi soldiers on into Moussa’s inner sanctum. Less than ten seconds had elapsed since the frame charge was detonated and they found the pirate gang-leader still struggling to get out of his bed, while trying to bring his AK-47 to bear on the attackers. The naked woman who had been in bed with him was screaming the place down while trying to squeeze herself down between the bed and the wall.
Without even a momentary pause, Harper put a double tap into Moussa’s head, while Laiya silenced the screaming woman with a stinging slap across the face and then immobilised her with plastic handcuffs. After checking that the rest of the building was clear, they searched the room and found several steel ammunition boxes hidden under the bed. Each of them was stuffed with Western currency - Euros, pounds, Swiss francs and US dollars - in high denomination notes.
Gesturing to the others to help, they dragged one of the boxes out into the open and began throwing the money it contained up into the air and over the remains of the outer wall where, caught and dispersed by the early morning breeze, the notes drifted all over the village, falling like manna from heaven among the incredulous villagers. Ignoring the continuing fire from the Saudi soldiers maintaining the perimeter, some of the
villagers began emerging from cover and scrabbling in the dust, gathering up handfuls of notes - probably more money than they had seen in their entire lives.
‘That will keep them busy, while we get out of here,’ Harper said. He paused for a moment, looking at the remaining boxes of cash. ‘There must be enough here to make even a Saudi oil sheikh pause for thought. Shame we can’t take it with us, but we can’t carry it and I’m not sure your Boss would be too happy if we did, because it might suggest our minds weren’t entirely focussed on the task. Still, no sense in leaving it here for the pirates. They’ll only be buying replacement craft and weapons with it.’
With Laiya’s help, he emptied out the contents of all the other boxes, piling up a mound of banknotes. He took out his disposable lighter, set fire to the pile and waited for a few seconds to make sure it was fully alight. ‘Right, job done, no need to hang about any longer,’ he said.
Regrouping, they stormed back down through the heart of the village, using fire and movement, one group putting down covering fire while the others sprinted a few yards then dropped into cover to return the compliment. They kept up a barrage of vicious suppressing fire that took out any of Moussa’s remaining men still putting up a fight and kept the heads of the rest well down. When they reached the shore, they eliminated any possibility of further pursuit by pouring fire into the two pirate attack-craft beached by Moussa and his surviving crew the day before. Rounds from the Saudis’ semi-automatic rifles punched holes through the hulls, sending a blizzard of splinters into the air. Had anyone attempted to launch the craft after that, they would have sunk within seconds.
Harper, Laiya and her men waded out through the shallows and were picked up by the Al Shaheen’s landing craft, waiting just offshore, and carried back to the ship. Their only casualty was one of the attack team who had been slightly wounded by a ricochet from one of the villagers’ AK-47s.
On board everyone was understandably jubilant, whooping and high-fiving each other. Harper and Laiya let them enjoy the moment for a while before calling them to order and reminding them that there was still much work to be done. ‘You’ve done great today and earned your celebration,’ Harper said, ‘but you need to refocus quickly because there are bigger and probably harder tasks ahead.’
Laiya nodded. ‘This was only the first phase of a three-stage operation. We head north at once, ready to begin planning the next phase.’
The Al Shaheen was already slicing through the water, its propulsive jets driving it at high speed away from Somalia and back towards the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, while its stealth profile continued to hide it from the radar of the patrolling NATO flotilla.
CHAPTER 9
While the Al Shaheen continued north, the ship’s helicopter transferred Laiya and Harper direct to the Saudi black ops base in answer to an urgent summons from Anwar. When they walked into the briefing room where he was waiting, he wasted few words on congratulations for the success of phase one. ‘The second op is now very much “Go” and we will value your involvement, Lex, not only because of your special skill-set, but also because we believe you know the area where the op will take place. To give you the background: the government of Saudi Arabia was recently approached by an intermediary bearing an offer from a Serbian mafia gang. In return for a payment of several million US dollars they are offering to supply us with a Tactical Nuclear device they have obtained.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Harper said. The Serb mafia was a very heavy-duty organisation. They were into everything; drug-peddling, arms-trafficking, armed robbery, smuggling, people-trafficking, protection rackets, prostitution and smuggling. In the early 2000s it was reliably estimated that they had a bigger budget, a larger army and better equipment than the Serbian state itself and they killed politicians, government ministers and even the Serbian prime minister with impunity. Although the Serbian police had made some high-profile busts in recent years, Harper knew that the Serb mafia was still the most powerful and dangerous organised crime group in Europe, even pushing the Sicilian mafia and the Ndrangheta – another Sicilian crime group - out of the drug trade in Italy.
‘Nuclear weapons is a bit of a step up even for them,’ he said. ‘How convinced are you that they really do have a Tac Nuke?’
‘We know the device is real, because we asked for and were given the serial number and we traced that back to a Spetsnaz installation in the former DDR - East Germany - in 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The device is definitely viable, because according to open source NATO documents, these things have a shelf life of over fifty years. What has particularly focussed our minds is intelligence that suggests that in an attempt to start a bidding war between us, the Serbian gangsters have also offered the device to the Government of Iran. As you know, the Iranians are our greatest enemies and they would like nothing better than to turn the cities of the Kingdom to dust. The Iranians have already been talking to the sellers and our go-between insists that the endgame of those negotiations is near. So our greatest fear is that the device will end up in the hands of our hated enemies, the Iranians, and we believe that if they do get their hands on it, they will try to detonate it on Saudi territory in a location that will enable them to blame the Americans for the explosion. The presence of American troops and warplanes in the Kingdom - the Custodian of the Most Holy Places of Islam - has always been controversial among believers, and the Iranians believe that a nuclear explosion linked to the Americans would create such a backlash against the US that they would be forced to withdraw from the Arabian Peninsula. That would cause us real problems and would be a huge gain for our enemies.’
‘And what will you do with the device if you are successful in getting hold of it? Harper asked.
‘Oh, we would undoubtedly destroy it,’ Anwar said, stone-faced.
‘Really?’ said Lex, trying but failing to keep the cynicism from his voice. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t, for example, take a leaf out of the Iranian playbook and detonate the device near one of the Iranian Atomic Research Installations, creating the impression that, despite their protestations that their research is entirely devoted to civil nuclear power, they have been developing nukes? That would inevitably lead to the Israeli Air Force launching strikes to bomb the Iranians back into the dark ages.’
Anwar shrugged. ‘All that is wild speculation, Lex, and as military men, our job is to deal in facts on the ground and leave policy and strategy to our political masters.’ He held his gaze for a moment and then resumed, his tone brisk and no-nonsense. ‘Now what do you know about Tactical Nuclear Devices?’
‘Tac Nukes? Quite a lot. I trained with them when I was in the Parachute Regiment of the British Army. The ones I worked with were a two-stage device, the first stage was in effect a primer, the equivalent of one thousand pounds of TNT. That was used to detonate the second stage, the nuclear bit, which was equivalent to a bomb of twenty-five megatons. The two parts were man-portable. Stage one weighed about fifteen kilos and was the size of a shoebox; stage two weighed about fifty kilos and was the size of a medium suitcase. Once on target, they could be plugged together and after a series of warm-up tests, they could be detonated remotely, with the troops who delivered them hopefully having extracted to a safe distance from the site of the blast.’ He gave a cynical smile. ‘Or that was how they sold it to us anyway, but common sense told us that even Usain Bolt wouldn’t be able to make a fast enough get away to avoid being cooked like an overdone steak. The Tac Nukes were to be used to target choke points and enemy troop and logistic areas, and they were considered to be “dirty bombs”, throwing out a lot of radiation and rendering the area inhospitable for years afterwards. We were allowed to look but not touch but everyone involved knew that to take one of those on to the battlefield would effectively have been a suicide mission. For a couple of years, the boffins and Army brass were trying to decide the best way of delivering them to where they were needed, after all our air force and cruise missiles had been blown out of the sky. There wa
s a difference of opinion as to whether to use a company of Paras - about a hundred men - to fight their way to the target area with the device in the centre, or whether to use a four-man SAS patrol to infiltrate the device covertly to the target. Even though we were never shown or told the results of the TACEVAL - the Tactical Evaluation Exercise - the SAS eventually won the argument hands down. With the inevitable exception of the senior officers in the Paras who had an unfailing appetite for volunteering their men for every mission going, and the more suicidal the better, since those were the ones where the most gongs were subsequently handed out to the officers, everyone else agreed that the SAS option was the more viable, partly because if it went wrong, instead of losing a company, you would only lose a four-man patrol.’
He gave a bleak smile. ‘Anyway, that’s what you’ll be dealing with if the Saudi bid is successful. So I hope you’ll be handling it with due care and attention.’
The Al Shaheen docked back at its Red Sea base that evening and within minutes Armourers were bringing aboard replacements for the missiles and munitions used against the Somali pirates, food and water stocks were being replenished, fitters were making repairs to the damaged sections of the hull, with a team of painters following behind them to restore the ship to its pristine condition.
With the full team now back at base, Laiya called a planning conference for first thing the next morning, involving Harper, the Captain and Weapons Officer of the Al Shaheen, and all the members of the Saudi black ops team allocated to the next operation.
When the planning session began, Laiya immediately started briefing them on the actions on arrival in Serbia, but after letting her speak for a couple of minutes, Harper felt he had to interrupt. ‘With all due respect, Laiya, aren’t we putting the cart before the horse here? I’ve got some major concerns about our transit through the Suez Canal and I feel that those should be addressed before we move on to the op itself. Can we not take the briefing in sequence, deal with the transit to Serbia in stages and then get to the actions on target once we’ve made sure that we’re actually going to get there?’
Plausible Deniability: The explosive Lex Harper novella Page 11
