Syren's Song

by Claude G. Berube

  “A chicken coop? That’s all it takes?”

  “Pretty much, boss.”

  “Can we do the same with the ship?” Stark asked.

  “Kind of a tall order,” Warren laughed, but I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  “Okay. Let’s talk later about this. Send our guests in, XO,” Stark said as he turned back to Harrison.

  After Warren left the stateroom Stark could hear him in the passageway greeting their former colleague Jaime Johnson with his characteristic bear hug. “Jaime, girl! It’s good to see you.” The hmmphh of air being squeezed out of lungs was unmistakable.

  The short, blonde Navy commander in blue coveralls entered with another officer behind her. She took a deep breath before greeting Stark. “That man is going to hug someone to death someday,” she said, trying to elicit a smile from Stark. “How are you doing, sir?” He stood to shake her hand, keeping his still shaking left hand behind his back. “And I believe you remember my NAV,” she said, turning to Ens. Bobby Fisk.

  “Good to see you again, sir,” Fisk said.

  “Same, Bobby, although I wish it was under better circumstances. Jaime, how are Gunny Willis and our Sri Lankan liaison?” Stark asked.

  “The commander is all patched up. It wasn’t as bad as it looked. He was lucky. If the shot hadn’t glanced off his helmet it would have been a lot worse,” she said. “He’ll be transferring back to Syren in the next boat.”

  “And Gunny?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Connor. He didn’t make it. Our corpsman tried everything, but even if we had had the facilities on an amphib or a hospital ship it wouldn’t have mattered. He lost too much blood.”

  Stark sank into his chair and put his hands up to his face, trying to control the shaking as he remembered the first time he had met Willis in the gym at the U.S. embassy in Sana’a, Yemen. When Willis retired from the Marine Corps, Stark immediately took him on at Highland Maritime to train the security teams. He had become a close and trusted colleague. It was a bitter loss.

  “You’ve got three of my people on your ship, Jaime.”

  “Don’t worry. Remember, I worked for Highland Maritime too. I’ll take good care of them. We’re going to Chennai to transfer them.”

  “Chennai? Contact the Indian navy and see if Captain Dasgupta can meet you there. He’ll be a big help to you. I’d appreciate it if you could fill him in on all the details.”

  “Okay,” she said, then turned to Fisk. “Bobby? Can you give us a moment? I’ll meet you down at the boat.”

  Fisk said goodbye to Stark and closed the stateroom door behind him. Jaime sat on the edge of the bed closest to Stark’s desk. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Because you’ve just lost three men and because I know you. I caught your hand shaking. I’ve seen it before.”

  “My responsibility. My fault we were out there.”

  “No, not your fault. Your job. You saw something. It was your job to investigate it. You weren’t prepared for an EMP or the Tiger attack. And you were able to get off a warning. Connor, if you hadn’t told me, LeFon would have been hit and possibly sunk with more than three hundred American sailors.”

  “What about the other two ships?”

  “Blame the late Admiral Rossberg. He was just so damned arrogant. He wouldn’t listen to me, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to listen to you.”

  “Any survivors?”

  “We didn’t find any. We sent a small boat to the site to search. My chief engineer served in an LCS. He said those ships always have a lot of cracks in them. Once those Tamil weapons detonated, the ships went down fast.”

  “All those people lost because of Rossberg,” Stark said grimly. “That insufferable ass.”

  “Agreed. As far as the Highland Maritime personnel on the RHIB? You all did the best you could under the circumstances.” She removed her ball cap with the ship’s crest and held it. “So, what are your plans?” she continued.

  Stark had been thinking about that. He was still operating under a letter of marque, but the cost had already been high in lives. And he wasn’t sure how to proceed. Clearly this was not a minor insurgent campaign. The Sea Tigers had used a completely new type of weapon, and so far, at least, the world’s most advanced weapons had been helpless against it. What could one ship do against them? If he could get to the heart of their operations, though, he might be able to prevent more deaths like those that had happened on the LCSs and very nearly on LeFon.

  What was it Gunny Willis had said a few weeks before, when he and Connor had been training, with Willis as always getting the better of him? Oh, yeah, “You have got to finish a fight a lot quicker. . . . I know you’ve been in a few scraps, but you’ve been lucky.” At this moment Stark didn’t feel particularly lucky.

  DAY 9

  Chennai

  The FBI had no information at all on the three Hispanic men who had tried to kill Golzari outside Seattle. Their fingerprints were not on record. They carried no documentation—no driver’s licenses, no passports. Their vehicle had been stolen near Green Valley, Arizona, south of Tucson. The only item of interest investigators found was an empty bag from a fast-food place that had been stuffed under the passenger seat. The greasy receipt inside pointed to a burger joint just north of Los Angeles. The FBI suspected that the three were drug cartel members who had crossed the border illegally and gotten weapons from colleagues in California. They thought Golzari was simply a target of opportunity.

  Golzari thought otherwise but didn’t share his suspicions with the FBI. If Zheng R&D had access to guns in Singapore, with its stringent regulations, then the Chinese firm would have no problem sending killers across America’s porous border. Zheng was out to stop Golzari; he was sure of it—as sure as he was that Zheng’s people had killed Blake and the Singaporean informant. The Iranian-born Diplomatic Security agent had never before been deterred from following a case to its conclusion. This was not going to be the first time.

  He caught the first available flight to India. That was as close as he could get by commercial transportation because all of Sri Lanka’s airports and seaports were closed to outside traffic. With the memory of his flight to Singapore still fresh in his mind, he had taken the government-issued coach class ticket and upgraded it to first class with his own money. He hadn’t slept for two days, and if he was to have a chance at cracking the case, he needed sleep—a luxury not afforded those in the crowded, noisy coach cabin. The flight was uneventful, although he eyed every person on the plane with suspicion. Where would the next attack come from?

  During the long flight from Los Angeles he had put together more pieces of the puzzle. His brief trip back to the United States had yielded a name—Gala—and his visit with Dr. Abraham had yielded a potential take on Gala’s interests—the theoretical use of an element called hafnium to make explosives. Hafnium usually occurred with zirconium. Abraham had mentioned that zirconium was mined in Sri Lanka. Gala was from Sri Lanka. There had been reports of small explosions during Tiger attacks that had incapacitated electronics, but there was nothing that indicated the source. If the explosives were based on hafnium, Golzari thought, then a young Sri Lankan scientist had found a way to exploit the element in a way that Admiral Rickover’s brilliant Vulcans had not been able to do.

  Gala might have been conducting his research with funding from the Sri Lankan government, Golzari reasoned, but if he had, there would have been no reason to obtain the extruder through a shadow company. No, Gala was being funded by Zheng. And if Zheng had found a way to weaponize hafnium, then there could be broader implications well beyond a localized insurgency in Sri Lanka.

  Satisfied with his conclusions, Golzari leaned back, closed his eyes, and let his thoughts drift. These were easier days for him in Diplomatic Security. No longer tied to protection duty for diplomats—domestic and foreign—he was free to conduct his own investigations. It certainly beat standing outside some diplomat’s hotel room in
four-hour shifts counting the dots in ceiling tiles or the threads in a hotel carpet. He could exercise the more analytical side of his brain now, the side that had been trained by his father’s personal guard.

  When his father, General Farhad Golzari, had fled Iran after the shah was overthrown, he brought ten loyal bodyguards from the Savak—the secret police—with him. Though Golzari and his father were close, it was the guards who were with him around the clock, especially in the early years when his father feared Iranian revolutionaries would track down the family in the United States. The most senior of the guards had been with Savak since its creation in 1955, when an American major general named Schwarzkopf—the father of the general who led the troops during the Gulf War—had been brought in to train them.

  The hardened policemen had taught young Golzari a few of their more benign tricks—how to pick a lock, how to break in and conduct a search without being detected, how to tap phones, and how to tell if a man was lying, among others. And they trained him to shoot until he was better than any of them. That sure aim had enabled Golzari to take out the Zheng R&D assassination teams quickly and efficiently. The guards didn’t teach him the harsh interrogation methods the Savak was better known for—at least not when he was a child. And they recognized and protected his sexual orientation without stigmatizing him.

  Golzari, for his part, had simply absorbed everything they taught him. And during his career he regularly fell back on his Savak training, even during his brief stint as a police officer in Boston, never telling his superiors about the methods responsible for his unusual success rate. He was too skilled for his supervisors to realize that he had gone beyond the pale of the law. When he was the subject of regular polygraphs, he used tricks his father’s bodyguards had taught him—which they had learned from the CIA—to protect himself; no one ever discovered his Savak training as a youth—or his sexual orientation.

  He had once asked his Savak guards what it was like to kill a person. So they told him. They also told him that it got easier with each kill after the first because you lost part of your soul each time. Eventually, there was no soul left to feel sympathy or remorse. Golzari had lost most of his soul years before.

  After the plane landed at Chennai, the gateway to southern India, he caught a cab to the Hyatt Regency Chennai, a stunning square building with glass sides and rounded corners that dominated the city’s skyline. He was passing the lobby lounge on his way to the concierge desk when a few young Americans sipping beer at a table briefly caught his eye. A newsstand on his right displayed papers covering the new civil war in Sri Lanka, complete with photos of the devastation. He found a paper in English and was giving his charge card to the young woman at the register when he heard a voice behind him.

  “Agent Golzari?”

  Golzari turned quickly and smoothly, like a panther, and was surprised to recognize the blond young American standing behind him. “Ensign Fisk? From Bennington?”

  “Yes, sir! Well, not Bennington now, of course. I’ve been in USS LeFon since Yemen. Damn, who’ d have thought I’d run into you here?”

  “Indeed,” said Golzari. The odds of meeting a U.S. Navy ensign in an Indian city of nine million were quite high. “What brings you here?”

  “LeFon pulled in a few hours ago. We got overnight liberty from the skipper. You wouldn’t believe the week we’ve had. How about you join me for a drink and I’ll fill you in.”

  “I think I’ll do that.” Golzari said. “Let me check in and drop off my bag, and I’ll be right with you. Why don’t you get us a table?” He continued on to the registration desk as Bobby went over to the bar and told his shipmates he’d catch up with them later.

  “Hey, you’ll never guess who I ran into yesterday,” Bobby said after they were settled at a table for two. “Captain Stark.”

  “Connor Stark?” Golzari questioned.

  “Yes, sir. My old skipper. I saw him on his new ship, Syren.”

  “Here? What’s he—?”

  “That’s part of the story, Agent Golzari,” Fisk said.

  After hearing what Bobby had to say, Golzari couldn’t help but think that serendipity had brought him here at this particular time. Serendipity had also quite possibly provided a ride to Sri Lanka.

  Mount Iranamadu, Sri Lanka

  The past several days had passed in a haze for Melanie. The last thing she clearly remembered was escaping the soldiers pursuing her only to find herself facing another group, all pointing guns at her. She froze and waited for the guns to fire, wondering if it would hurt when the bullets entered her body. Two journalists she knew had been beheaded by Islamists, and she had tried to imagine what their final thoughts were as the end was approaching, when the cold metal was about to slice across their necks. The terrorist would cut back and forth, wielding the knife like a saw, until the carotids and esophagus were cut, then the ligaments, and finally the neck vertebrae, freeing the head from the body for the hooded murderer to wave in front of a video camera for the world to see. Those journalists were the brave ones. At least she wouldn’t have to face that. If Melanie was lucky, the soldiers would fire and kill her immediately and she would feel nothing.

  The other group of soldiers—the ones she had been running from—came up behind her. She felt a strike against her right temple, and that was the last thing she clearly remembered. She phased in and out of consciousness. Once in a while a guard slapped her awake and poured water in her mouth or shoved in moldy bread or a piece of fish and forced her to chew. Her memories were vague, but a fire was always burning in the background, and there were never less than six insurgents in their tiger-striped camouflage uniforms eating and talking, and only occasionally looking at their prisoner. Whenever she had a spurt of energy she would gamely try to struggle out of the ropes that secured her arms to a tree trunk. The men would watch and laugh.

  This time was different. She awoke to soldiers splashing water on her face and untying the rope that tethered her to the tree. They gave her a full meal, and after an hour had passed she had regained enough strength to remain awake. It was nighttime. The fire she remembered vaguely from the stress-induced fatigue was raging. By its light she could see a man enter the clearing. He waved the others away. When the others were gone the man walked over and sat cross-legged a few feet in front of her, silhouetted by the fire at his back. “Why are you here?” he asked.

  She froze. Unable to think of a response she fell back on her instincts. Journalists ask questions, they don’t answer them. “Why are you here,” she answered defiantly. “And who are you?”

  He brushed aside her question. “You are a stranger with no business here,” he said.

  Melanie struggled to concentrate. She squinted to make out his features. He wore a light white cotton shirt and khaki pants with a thin leather belt and sandals. He appeared to be in his forties, his skin darkened by years of work in the sun. His hair was thinning, and a goatee reminiscent of Ho Chi Minh’s adorned his chin.

  “I am not from here, that’s true. But I want to know more about you,” she said raising her chin. “That’s why I’m here.” She knew at that point that she was safe, at least for the moment. They were keeping her alive for some reason. Were they holding her for ransom? Did they think she was an intelligence agent? Probably not. She was clearly not Sri Lankan, and it was unlikely that a foreign intelligence agent would be here. She posed a threat to their operations, though, and why would they keep someone alive who threatened their operations?

  “What is your name?” he asked softly.

  “Melanie Arden,” she said without hesitation.

  He nodded. “Melanie Arden. And where are you from, Melanie Arden?”

  “I’m originally from South Africa.”

  “Then you are a . . . tourist?”

  “I am here to see your country,” she hedged.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I want to learn more about it,” she said.

  “What do you hope to learn in t
his jungle that you cannot learn from your computers and books?” he countered.

  At first glance he seemed a gentle and very intelligent man. Quiet and reserved but exuding strength despite his diminutive stature. His eyes, though—his eyes revealed an intensity that frightened her.

  “Do you not agree that firsthand experience is better than a book?” she asked. The longer she kept her identity a secret the longer she might remain alive. Keep asking him questions, she thought. If he’s answering my questions he won’t be able to ask his own. The game of questions could last forever, like the tales of the 1,001 Arabian Nights.

  “I think you are someone seeking answers,” he said intuitively. “You do not look like a tourist.”

  “Why? There must be many tourists in this beautiful country,” she said.

  He laughed softly. “Because this entire territory has been off limits to tourists for nearly a year. It is under private control, and we have patrols to keep outsiders such as you from entering.”

  “You can’t control an entire region of Sri Lanka,” she said.

  “Perhaps. But you are not in Sri Lanka. You are in Tamil territory. And soon you will be in Eelam, our nation,” he said defiantly.

  She kept on the offensive. “What is your name?”

  “You may call me what everyone else calls me—Vanni.”

  “Vanni,” she said with a nod. “Are you the leader of the Tamils?”

  He paused. “You ask too many questions,” he said, his voice turning cold. “A tourist would not ask so many questions. A tourist would be too frightened. You are not an intelligence officer, I think.” He smiled and nodded. “You are a reporter.”

  This man wasn’t stupid. “And if I am?”

  “Then you will tell our story—the story of the Tamil people’s glorious struggle for freedom and the new nation they will create.”

  “What if it is not the story I came for?” she asked.

  “Then you will tell no story.”