Syren's Song

by Claude G. Berube

  The helicopter stopped firing, and the sound of its engines faded away. Rossberg struggled to speak: “Where are they going? They have to come back for us.”

  Stark held up his hand for silence. If he knew Jaime Johnson, she wasn’t attacking with only a helicopter. She’d throw everything she had at them. That meant troops, and the only way they’d get here was by boat. He heard men yelling in pain and others shouting orders. And then he heard the sound of his guards opening the door. Stark and Rossberg had no value as hostages if they were rescued, and they posed a huge threat to the Tigers’ operations if they were allowed to tell what they knew. The Tigers had to eliminate them.

  After the first Tiger entered, his weapon drawn, Stark threw all his weight against the door, slamming it against the second guard. The first guard, still focused on the only target he saw in the room, did not see Stark’s muscular arm until it was wrapped around his neck. Stark lifted him up and then threw him to the ground, but not before the guard fired three shots at Rossberg. Stark quickly grabbed the guard’s gun, whirled toward the door, and fired four rounds as the second guard tried again to enter. The man was dead before he hit the ground. Stark turned back toward the prone Tiger, who defiantly rolled away from him. Stark fired once and missed before the gun jammed.

  The Tiger was half a foot shorter than Stark, but he smiled when he realized the injured American had no gun. It was one man against the other. The Tiger ignored the American crumpled against the wall as he looked about for a weapon. Stark threw the gun aside and crouched as if exhausted and in pain, exposing his left side to the Tiger. It wasn’t far from the truth—he knew he’d be useless in a fight right now with a barely functioning leg. His right hand slid down inside his boot.

  Stark tried to remember every move Gunny Willis had taught him in hand-to-hand combat on the training island off Ullapool. The Tiger closed on Stark and attempted a kick. Stark had foreseen this move; Willis had once done something similar. He quickly grabbed the man’s left leg and flipped him to the ground. As he did that he slipped out his sgian dubh and thrust it into the unsuspecting man’s throat. Stark stuck the knife in deep and twisted it. The man’s blood spurted onto Stark as he struggled for oxygen to fuel his dying brain. Stark pulled out the short dagger and stood aside to allow the man his final moments.

  More gunfire sounded from the east side—the ocean side—of the building.

  “You . . . you killed him,” Rossberg gasped behind him. “And you tried to kill me.” He held a bloody hand over his arm where the guard’s bullet had found its mark.

  Still holding the sgian dubh Stark limped toward Rossberg, his bare chest splattered with the guard’s blood. “And I may yet.” He raised his arm, pointing the weapon toward the admiral, then knelt beside him and struck him with his fist, knocking him unconscious.

  The gunfire from the ocean was becoming more intense. The helicopter was back, its .50-caliber firing again. Stark put the blood-covered dagger back into his boot, then collapsed from exhaustion. He had no real weapon to defend himself if more Tigers came for him. He had to trust the assault the others had planned. He heard fewer and fewer Tamils until the gunfire stopped and men approached the building.

  “Americans,” someone called as the door burst open.

  “I used to be, too,” he said weakly.

  Two Highland Maritime security officers entered and swept the room. Syren’s medic and Special Agent Damien Golzari followed close behind them.

  “Are you ready to get out of here?” Golzari asked as the medic checked Stark quickly for life-threatening wounds.

  “I think I’d like to stay,” Stark said right before he passed out.

  PART III

  DAY 15

  Mullaitivu

  Vanni had bided his time since the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009. He still believed that the Tamil people deserved a better life and would have one if they followed him. He hoped for revenge against those who had defeated his comrades. So he organized the remaining loyal Tigers into a new cadre. He sought resources. When he found them, like the hafnium, he exploited them. When people opposed him or seemed ambivalent in their support, he had his most loyal Tigers execute them—all the great Marxist leaders had done this, he knew. It was efficient, clean, and necessary. He just had to be patient and wait for the right opportunity. And so he waited. And his time had finally come.

  He believed the earlier Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—the LTTE, as the world knew them—had lost because they had spread their resources too thin by fighting both on land and at sea. Colonel Soosai himself had summoned Vanni to fight with his forces at sea after the Sea Tigers’ leader had heard of Vanni’s successes on land. And while he was at sea Vanni had seen the future of his rebellion. Although ships and boats cost more initially than trucks and arms, they required fewer personnel than an army and their versatility allowed the LTTE to grow as a whole.

  Fighting at sea offered major benefits. The first was that the sea provided financing. Vanni organized his small ships to pirate freighters, which were then used to make money through human and drug trafficking. He followed the example set by the Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa who attacked and captured nearly any ship they wanted and collected millions in ransom. Vanni’s strategy had filled the LTTE’s coffers.

  The second benefit was the multitude of supply lines the sea offered to the Tigers. On land, trailers had to travel on roads between cities. In the air, planes had to follow certain routes. Even the oceans had distinct sea lanes—well-defined patterns that offered the shortest route between two points. But there were no sea lanes when it came to illicit trafficking. In fact, traffickers mostly avoided the more common routes altogether. Vanni himself had traveled to Myanmar, Singapore, China, and even North Korea on crew passports taken by his pirates. He made connections in the maritime underworld. That was how he contacted Hu’s organization and became a part of its network. Intrigued by the description of Gala’s hafnium weapons and their potential to destabilize the country, Hu provided shiploads of basic equipment for mining and military operations—everything from thousands of AK-47s to the contents of the latest shipment—a cargo of innocuous bicycles.

  Hu was impressed by the accomplishments of the young scientist Gala and sent some of his own people to support Gala’s laboratory—and to keep an eye on his investment in a weapon China could utilize itself one day. Vanni recognized this but chose not to tell Hu that the Chinese would never get the hafnium. If Vanni’s plan succeeded, not even the Chinese would be able to get to him.

  The third benefit lay in the fact that Sri Lanka was an island. The goods that entered and left the island’s ports were vital to the nation’s economy. During the first civil war the Sri Lankan navy had cut off the Tigers’ supply lines. With the EMP weapons Vanni now did the same to Sri Lanka. There was no longer a navy to protect the nation’s commerce, and merchant freighters and airlines now avoided the ports and airfields.

  The fourth and final benefit was that the ships he intended to use to win this war could be his new capital as well, if needed. Cities like Mullaitivu, the former Tigers’ last stronghold, were subject to attacks, invasion, and capture. Not so the great ships, which could always be on the move. After years of planning Vanni now had a fleet that far surpassed that of the previous Sea Tigers. He still had stealthy suicide boats, powerboats, and trawlers, but he had taken his pain and anger and had turned it into a new fleet with a new type of weapon that would take the Sri Lankans, the Chinese, and the Americans by storm.

  Prior to the civil war, the LTTE had effectively governed its own state, but the Sri Lankan government had put an end to that following the defeat. Vanni wasn’t certain he could reclaim all that he considered the Tamils’ homeland, but he was certain he could prevent the Sri Lankan government from ever being capable of stopping the Tamils again. The plan was just days away from implementation.

  As always, Vanni was dressed simply this evening in plain khaki clothes—the same sort
of clothing he had seen in photos of Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and Pol Pot. He eschewed the gaudy medals and elaborate military uniforms South American dictators favored and Libya’s Gaddafi had worn. The simplicity had two reasons: it suggested that he was above such tawdry government awards, and people who did value ostentation tended to underestimate him.

  The building in which he now stood had been the last stand for many of his former Tiger brothers and sisters, the site of their final battle. Had he not been out on a mission, he would have been here with them and the Sri Lankan army would have executed him as well. “It is our time again, my friends,” he said, his voice echoing against the concrete walls and tin roof of the large storage facility. The last rays of the sun lit up the windows on the west wall. In just a few hours the building would be full of people, and he would address his Sea Tigers as they prepared for their mission. And he would have two hostages to inspire their bloodlust.

  He stooped and touched the wooden floor, passing his hand over the bloodstains that were all that remained of his compatriots and friends, including the Tiger who had first recruited him. By the end of the war she had commanded her own boat and had returned to Mullaitivu for its defense, thinking he was still there. She was gone, as were his family members lost to the Breakers or to the war and the mass executions by the Sri Lankan government. No international investigation ever uncovered all the bodies or determined who had killed those they did find. That was why Vanni felt no remorse when he told his own men to bury those he had butchered. They were just bodies for the earth.

  A soldier entered from the other side of the building, calling loudly, “Vanni!”

  Vanni rose quickly. “I told you not to disturb me.”

  One of Vanni’s Tiger loyalists pulled a bloodied young soldier through the doorway. The conscript limped up to his leader to give his report. Visibly trembling, the man whispered, “The American hostages are gone.”

  “Tell me everything,” Vanni said quietly.

  The soldier stumbled over his words as he tried to describe the UAV that crashed into the truck and the helicopter that came out of the sun firing bullets. Then came the small boats onto the beach. They had taken the Americans away on the boats and back across the horizon.

  “Who were these people?”

  “Americans,” the shaking man said.

  “And how do you know what happened?” Vanni asked.

  “The others were killed. Only I and another survived.”

  “Give me your gun,” Vanni ordered. The conscript immediately did as he was told. Vanni checked that it was loaded then pointed it at the man’s head and fired.

  “Kill the other survivor as well,” he said to the Tiger. “We do not want Americans involved in this. Perhaps they will leave now that they have their people back.” He pointed at the dead man. “Get this thing out of here. I must prepare.”

  “Shall I have your boat readied, Vanni?”

  “Yes. After the speech I will go back to the ship tonight. Send someone there now with orders to send out more small patrol boats. I want to know where the Americans are.”

  M/V Syren

  When he had ordered the medical module for the ship, Connor Stark hadn’t planned to be the first one treated there. His medic—a retired Navy corpsman—had outfitted the container with four beds, two stacked on each side, and a treatment table. Stark lay on his stomach as Doc—after first injecting a numbing agent—meticulously picked out debris from the deep abrasions on his back to reduce the chance of infection.

  Connor had received fewer lashes from Vanni’s man than some sailors received two hundred years ago, before flogging was abolished as corporal punishment. Given how much pain he had suffered he found it difficult to imagine what one of those floggings must have felt like. The wounds were open and raw. Some of the blood had dried while he was hanging from the pulley, but the wounds continued to ooze fluid.

  In the reflection of one of the container’s small mirrors he saw Damien Golzari standing with his arms crossed as he watched the procedure.

  “Enjoying this?” he asked the Diplomatic Security agent.

  “Just sorry I didn’t have a chance to do it myself. The man was clearly an amateur. I would have made a perfect chessboard pattern. The Tiger’s pattern is unfortunately haphazard. Shame, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Stark said sarcastically.

  Golzari thought back to the locker room at the embassy in Yemen when he had first seen Stark’s naked body as he emerged from the sauna. It was scarred with bullet wounds, stab wounds, and one or two others he couldn’t identify. Now he would bear these unmistakable signs of torture for the remainder of his life as well.

  “This is going to hurt a bit, Captain, even with the lidocaine,” the medic said as he started cleaning out the wounds with peroxide. Stark tensed up and clenched his teeth with each application. The medic dressed the wound with an antibiotic ointment and then laid gauze over the wounds. He helped Stark up to a seated position, then wrapped more gauze around Stark’s torso to keep the bandages in place.

  “Thanks again for coming for me,” he said to the two men, still clenching his teeth.

  “Commander Johnson’s plan was very effective,” Golzari answered, “but we were lucky they didn’t use an EMP rocket against the helicopter. They had three. We brought them back with us.”

  “What’s the old saying? ‘Success is where luck and preparation meet,’” Stark commented, still trying to block out the pain. “Why didn’t they use one of them?”

  “Most of them were looking at the wreckage of the UAV and didn’t hear the helicopter coming until it was too late,” Golzari said. “The helicopter took out about half of them. By then, our two boats had made it ashore and we eliminated the remainder of the opposition.”

  Once again Stark was struck by Golzari’s ability to dissociate himself from those he killed in the line of duty. The Iranian American saw the opposition as simple targets, no different from those on a firing range.

  “Where’s Rossberg?” Stark asked.

  “Ah, the admiral. Yes, well, he regained consciousness on the boat and said something about you trying to kill him,” Golzari said. “We thought it best to send him directly to LeFon.”

  “I’m not on active duty anymore. Do I admit to that, Agent Golzari?”

  “Best not to, I’d think. Bloody shame we couldn’t leave the wanker behind. We knew there was another hostage, but we didn’t know it was him.”

  “How’d you find us? Let me guess—Jay and his magic bag of tricks.”

  “Yes. He is quite useful, isn’t he?”

  There was a knock on the door. The medic said, “Enter,” and Olivia Harrison walked in.

  “Great job, Liv,” Stark said to her.

  “Great crew, Connor. How are you feeling?”

  “Good enough to hear a report on what’s happening out there.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, while the medic examined Stark’s leg and knee, Harrison described the rescue’s aftermath. As the RHIBs were leaving shore a few speedboats arrived on the scene and chased them for a few nautical miles until the other two RHIBs provided cover. Then Syren bore down on the speedboats and began firing on them from just beyond the range of their EMP rockets. LeFon was a few miles behind Syren, and her 5-inch guns began firing for effect in the proximity of the speedboats, which eventually turned around and returned to their base in the north. Syren picked up the four RHIBs, returned to station with Asity, and sent Admiral Rossberg to LeFon.

  “So now he’s Jaime’s problem. God help her. Did he say anything?” Stark asked.

  “Other than that you attacked him?” Golzari said with a smirk.

  “He said he didn’t remember the LCS going down,” Harrison said. “The first thing he remembered was being held on a ship.”

  “Did he say what ship?” Stark asked.

  “He had no idea except he saw some Russian markings on some pipes.”

  “Moving or stationary?”

&n
bsp; “Stationary.”

  “Rossberg told me in the shack that he was brought to shore in a small boat. Six to eight knots for about an hour,” Stark said. “And you said the speedboats were heading back north?”

  Olivia nodded.

  “Let me guess—the Breakers,” he said to Harrison and Golzari.

  “That would make sense, Stark,” Golzari said. “There are dozens of old ships and so much activity that the Sri Lankan government wouldn’t have noticed a concentration of Sea Tigers there. Most of those ships are so large that you could hide anything in them.”

  “Including people, speedboats, an ore-processing facility, and a weapons laboratory,” Stark observed.

  “And logistics from the sea. Any ship could enter the anchorage and leave practically unnoticed,” Olivia added.

  “Looks like we’ve accomplished our primary mission and found the Sea Tigers’ base,” Stark said. “But the Sri Lankan navy is gone, the two replacement ships were sunk thanks to Admiral Rossberg, all our communications are down, and the Tigers are getting ready to mount a major offensive. Olivia, let’s meet with the other captains as soon as possible.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Am I good to go, Doc?” Stark asked the medic.

  “Just be careful with those bandages, sir. I don’t want you ripping open your wounds. You’ve got to take it easy. And here’s something for you,” he said, handing him a small bottle of pills from the cabinet.

  “What are they? Motrin?”

  “Motrin won’t help enough. It’s Percocet. Take one every four hours for the next few days. Then we’ll taper them off. Strong stuff, Captain.”

  “Duly noted, Doc. Thanks. Let’s get back to work,” Stark said as he confidently jumped off the table, and then gasped in pain as his feet hit the deck. Golzari caught him before he went down.