Joint Task Force #2: America

by David E. Meadows

  Without taking his eyes from the window, the Boatswain Mate replied, “I’m sure, skipper, we be going west.”

  “What course?”

  “West, sir.”

  “West? What course west?”

  “Don’t know, ’xactly. Right now, I just wanna keep us heading west, sir.”

  The Lieutenant waved his left hand at the window. “Make it so, Jenson.”

  Tucker shook his head and pulled back into the small area behind the bridge. St. Cyr had his eyes shut, pretending to sleep. Wing Commander Tibbles-Seagraves’s eyelids widened with each crashing wave, reminding Tucker of a deer caught in the headlights. Obviously, this British SAS had not been around the Royal Navy’s Special Operations boats. But to the older man’s credit, he hadn’t been seasick.

  Tucker Raleigh leaned back and glanced out of the small window behind him. Clouds were closing fast from the east, and they still had another twenty-five to thirty nautical miles to travel to reach the safety of the Virginia coast. The amphibious battle group under Admiral Holman had disappeared nearly an hour before, the faint wake showing their change of course before the growing ocean turbulence erased the watery trail of the ships.

  Tucker forced himself up, grabbing the line strung from the front of the compartment where they waited to the rear near the hatch leading to the outside. He leaned down and stared at the ocean behind them. The Mark V was a fantastic craft. Two 2285-horsepower engines propelled the craft, using two specially configured waterjets. The Mark V could approach land so close that many times SEAL teams practically stepped ashore. The challenge for the small crafts, which operated in pairs, was to leave the shelter of shore and tackle the wild side of the ocean. Something they were doing now. Normally they’d be hitting forty to fifty knots across a normal sea state of two. He pressed his face to the small glass panel in the door and looked both right and left. A wave hit the side of the craft, causing him to nearly lose his balance. Probably a sea state five, he guessed. But, no way he was going to voice that opinion. The young Lieutenant up front with the Boatswain Mate was a Surface Warfare type. If he said sea state five and was right, they’d agree with him and exchange glances as if asking each other, why is he telling us something we already know? If he was wrong, they’d exchange the same glance as if telling each other, See! Navy SEALs! Don’t know a damn thing about sailing a ship. That was true, but he knew lots about single-handedly sinking them.

  He made his way back to the row of cushioned seats built along the side of the craft. The Mark V had a permanent crew of five and could carry sixteen passengers. They had more than enough room for the two SEAL teams that had been assigned to him and his two allied friends. However, Green told him, the Admiral was keeping the SEALs on board. Just because he couldn’t use the three of them because of politics didn’t mean they couldn’t use the remainder of the team. So now the three of them rode the rough seas back to Little Creek to twiddle their fingers, make noises of allied cooperation, and when this crisis was over, tell each other how much they had enjoyed working with each other.

  The craft tilted to port. Tucker twisted in the middle of the roll and allowed the momentum to seat him beside St. Cyr. He bumped the man, causing the Frenchman’s eyes to open for a moment before they started to fade shut again.

  “Sorry,” Tucker shouted over the noise of the engines and the seas.

  St. Cyr shrugged, his eyes opening. He leaned toward Tucker and nodded across the small compartment at Tibbles-Seagraves. “I think our English friend is finding the ride a little too exciting for his taste.”

  “I think it’s a little too exciting for mine.”

  St. Cyr grinned. “I know what you mean. Most of my time in boats of this size has not been in the middle of an ocean inching toward shore.” He nodded toward the bridge area. “Do you think they can increase their speed?”

  Tucker looked toward the bridge for a moment, heard the Boatswain Mate shout something that sounded like “west,” and then turned back to St. Cyr. “I think they’re having to keep it at this speed because of the sea state.”

  “Bien sur,” St. Cyr said, leaning back against the thin bulkhead and shutting his eyes. “I would do the same thing, I think. Just I would do it faster.”

  “We should be through this within the next three to four hours.”

  The Frenchman nodded without opening his eyes. “I believe you. I just hope this small craft holds together, because I hate to swim to shore from this far out.”

  “It would be a long swim.”

  “I’m more concerned how it will cause my skin to wrinkle,” St. Cyr replied, winking. “Then how will your American women be able to truly appreciate a well-groomed French warrior, if I look like a prune?”

  Tucker laughed. He glanced at Tibbles-Seagraves, who forced a faint smile in reply. He doubted the Englishman wanted to take a chance on talking. “Air Force,” he said without thinking.

  “Oui. And British, too.”

  CHAPTER 6

  CAPTAIN ABU ALRAJOOL LEANED AGAINST THE FORWARD bulkhead of the small bridge. Taking the washcloth from the ledge beneath the windows, he reached up and wiped away the fog from the window. The shielded forward light on the bow did little to cut through the night. Its primary purpose was to warn other ships of the freighter’s presence. He grasped the line running overhead as the ship rolled to starboard. The inclinometer read fifteen degrees. Not bad that time, he thought. The rain beat down on the large windows across the top half of the forward bulkhead. Eight wipers beat out of sync, fighting a losing battle to clear the torrent of water coming from the sky and the sea, pounding the ship.

  “This is terrible,” Tamursheki said from the darkness near the hatch leading off the bridge. “Maybe we should head in a different direction?”

  Alrajool laughed. “This is nothing, my friend.” He tossed the washcloth on the ledge, turned around, and brushed his hands against each other. “I have been through worse and so has this ship that you keep calling a tramp.” He pointed toward the hatch leading to the starboard bridge wing. “What makes you nervous is that the clouds have blocked out any light a normal clear night would gain from the stars and the moon. Mix that with a slight sea . . .” He turned to the helmsman. “Ramos, what would you say the sea state is? Four? Five?”

  The dark-skinned Filipino, one of the remnants of Abu Suwayf, licked his lips. His eyebrows scrunched as if he was thinking. After nearly a half-minute, he said, “I think, sea state six, boss.”

  “Tell our leader, here, why you think it is sea state six, Ramos.”

  Nearly a minute passed before the small, thin Filipino former-terrorist answered. He lifted his hand and pointed to the anemometer. “First, true wind is thirty-seven knots, coming from our stern. Second, the waves breaking across our bow, which is twenty-five feet above the water. Third, slight roles—ten to fifteen degrees; and the pitch, she is acceptable.”

  “Pitch?”

  “Pitch is when the bow and the stern move up and down but not at the same time. If we reach the point where the whole ship is moving up and down, we call that a heave, and if you’ve a weak stomach, you’ll discover another reason it’s called heave.”

  “I don’t understand a word that you say, old man,” Tamursheki said defensively. “Your job is to drive the ship and get us to our destination. I have met you sailors before. Always talking in a strange language, as if the language of the streets is not good enough for those on the sea.”

  “For a man about to die, you possess a strong sense of arrogance.”

  “Do not toy with me.”

  Alrajool shrugged, walked over to the radar repeater on the port side of the ship, presenting his back to the terrorist leader.

  Tamursheki watched the ship’s captain bend over and put his face against the rubber face guard that surrounded and masked the radar video repeater. He had no experience with the sea, having grown up in the deserts of Arabia. His sea had been the shifting sands of the desert, and his ship had been the
camel in his youth. The bow of the ship rose, a fresh wave of rain hit against the bridge windows. The sudden intensity of the water caught and held Tamursheki’s attention. He wiggled his fingers slightly, letting blood flow through them. He hadn’t realized how tightly he had been holding the metal bar protruding from the starboard bulkhead. He should go below. But he had been below, and the rocking and rolling of the ship made him nervous, which was why he had come to the bridge.

  The hatch behind Tamursheki opened and another one of Alrajool’s sailors entered. It amazed him to watch these men walk the decks without holding on to anything as the ship tossed and rolled from side to side. He had bounced off the bulkheads just walking from the galley to the bridge. The sailor turned, his legs bent slightly to compensate for the ship’s movement, and pushed the locking bar down on the watertight hatch.

  Alrajool looked up from the radar repeater. “Nothing out here but us and land smear to our southwest. Navigator, where do you have us?”

  The Navigator, a slight man of Asian descent sitting on a metal stool behind Alrajool, reached over and flipped on a red light mounted directly over the table in front of him. He reached up and pressed a button to activate the Global Positioning Satellite System. “Ummmmm,” the man mumbled.

  “I need more than a guttural noise, Hung.”

  “I am taking a fix now, Captain,” he said, using a compass to make a light pencil mark on the chart. “I have us . . . right here.” He tapped the chart with the penciled end of the compass.

  Alrajool turned around to the chart table. “Hung, we have to talk about your navigation terms. ‘Right here’? What kind of talk is that?”

  The man shrugged, picked up his tiny Turkish coffee cup, and tossed the thick, hot mixture down his throat. “Right here,” he said again, his voice neither hostile nor pleasant. The Navigator revealed no emotion. It told Tamursheki the man cared neither whether he pleased Alrajool or made him angry. He had met men such as him everywhere he had fought. Men who had reached a point where even survival meant little to them. They surfed along the surface of fate, willing to follow whatever paths others chose.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  Alrajool looked toward the dark silhouette of Tamursheki. “We are north of the American Virgin Islands; about two hundred miles.” The captain turned to the sailor who was standing quietly beside the radar repeater. He held out his hand. “What do you have, Latif?”

  The man handed Alrajool a sheet of paper.

  Tamursheki caught the motion of the Captain’s head as the old man looked up from the paper toward him. If he or any of his men knew how to drive this ship, he would throw the old man over the side to let the sharks feast on him. During daylight, of course, because he wanted to see the fear on the old man’s face.

  Alrajool reached forward and patted the sailor on the shoulder. Tamursheki strained to hear what the Captain whispered to the young man. He reached out to stop the sailor as he passed, but Alrajool spoke, distracting Tamursheki’s attention for that fraction of a second needed for the sailor to disappear through the hatch.

  “Here,” Alrajool said, approaching Tamursheki. “You have your destination. Seems your boss, Abu Alhaul, has his own ideas of where we should go.”

  Tamursheki reached forward and jerked the paper from Alrajool.

  “God grant me peace from children who never grow up,” Alrajool muttered.

  Tamursheki held tight to the bulkhead rung, afraid the erratic movement of the ship would toss him to the deck if he let go.

  “There’s no light here. Why don’t you move to forward, where there are some red lights and you can read it,” Alrajool offered acidly.

  Tamursheki knew the man wanted to see him fall. This man, whose neck he could easily break, was trying to humiliate him in front of the seamen. He could do this. If this old man could do it, he could. Tamursheki eased his grip for a fraction of a second. The ship abruptly rolled to port, as if knowing the precise moment Tamursheki released his hold. He fell into the bulkhead, his hand eagerly grabbing the bulkhead rung again. He tightened his grip, ignoring the smile barely visible in the shadows across the Captain’s face. The day would come when he wouldn’t need this man, nor his crew. When that day arrived, he would make sure the man knew who put the bullet into his head, or knew who the man was who sawed the knife slowly across and through his neck as if working through a tough side of beef. He would enjoy the death of this man, even if Abu Alhaul trusted him to carry the word of Allah, but who Tamursheki knew lusted only after the American dollar. His lips curled. He handed the paper back. “You’ve read it. You tell me where we are to go.”

  He saw the shrug of the shoulders. Alrajool turned away from Tamursheki, moving near a red light mounted over the Captain’s chair on the starboard side of the bridge. The Captain had little respect for him. This he knew. Alrajool turned so he faced Tamursheki, the red light directly on the paper in front of him. A flash of lightning lit the bridge, revealing a grin stretched from one side of Alrajool’s face to the other. The Captain’s eyes burned into his, but Tamursheki refused to look away. To look away would be to lose face to this man who would never know the pleasures of paradise.

  These men of the sea thought themselves above those who had never crossed it. They thought themselves above the Allah of all men.

  “You’re right. I have read it, but you have the orders to execute. I can only tell you where we are going, and I can tell you how we are going to get there. But you must be assured that how and where I take you is where you are supposed to go.” He handed the paper back to Tamursheki. “I’m not going to tell you what it says only to have you later say you never read the message. What do you take me for? A fool? I have dealt with others of your ilk and I know the games played to keep the advantage.”

  He jerked the message away. “Don’t play with me, old man. It matters little to me if you die now or . . .” He stopped abruptly, but the words were already said.

  “Or, what? Later? Don’t try it, Tamursheki. I have more than the ear of Abu Alhaul. Here,” he said, handing Tamursheki a red-shaded flashlight. “Even you can’t read in the dark, my friend.”

  Tamursheki took the flashlight and pushed his arm through the metal handhold, using the crook of his elbow to hold him against the bulkhead. With the flashlight rigged for the night, Tamursheki read the short paragraph in English. When he looked up, Alrajool reached over and took the flashlight.

  “I hate to lose these,” Alrajool sneered, waving the flashlight at Tamursheki.

  “He says we aren’t going to Savannah nor New Orleans. We are going to . . .”

  “I know. I didn’t understand why either of those two were more important, would yield more damage, but”—Alrajool shrugged—“my orders are to drop off some of you along the way, and once at the destination, disembark the cargo. I’m sure you look forward to becoming a martyr, and the more I get to know you, young man, the more I, too, look forward to providing the opportunity for you to achieve your just rewards.”

  Tamursheki shifted, freeing his elbow and grasping the handhold again. The bow of the ship rose and fell. A wave broke across the bow, sending water breaking over the main deck and splattering against the bridge windows. “We will have teams to let off along the coast.”

  Alrajool nodded. “That’s true, and I’ll get you within range. After that, it is up to you. But I will only promise to disembark a team if we can do it without much danger to my ship.” He turned and worked his way to the bank of windows along the front of the bridge. His knees bent, adjusting to the tilt of the ship as it pitched and rolled with the sea. A gust of wind whipped along the sides of the ship, drawing a long shrill as it hit the slight divides between the hatches and the outer skin of the ship. The weather was behind them. Its wind pushed against the stern of the freighter, driving it ahead of the slow-moving storm. “I won’t jeopardize the ship any more than I have to, Tamursheki. There are other missions and only so many ships available.”

  T
he ship steadied for a moment. Tamursheki released his hold and fell more than walked toward the hatch leading off the bridge. A minute later, he was through the hatch and using his hands along the bulkhead to balance. He stumbled aft and down, seeking a place where the movements of the ship lessened.

  Alrajool watched the terrorist from the open hatch for a few moments before shutting the watertight door and pulling the handle down to seal it. Several flashes of lightning lit up turbulent seas around the freighter. He looked around at the crewmembers on the bridge, who exchanged glances with each other. Then one laughed. Soon all of them were holding their stomachs, laughing at the “terrible” terrorist who could barely stand from his fear of the sea.

  TWO DECKS BELOW, TAMURSHEKI OPENED THE DOOR leading to Dr. Ibrahim’s clinic. Most of his men were there. Some sat cross-legged on the deck. Two lay on top of thin cotton blankets thrown on the deck, an arm across their eyes. The compartment smelled of vomit and tobacco. Four stood together at the far end of the large compartment that made up this makeshift clinic, talking and smoking.

  Two stainless-steel medical tables were bolted to the deck in the center of the compartment. Jabir lay on one of the tables. The huge giant Qasim moaned softly from the other. Between the two tables lay Fakhiri, curled in a fetal position, spittle running from between his lips onto a towel stained yellow from vomit.

  Ibrahim looked up as Tamursheki entered. “I see you found us,” he said.

  Tamursheki ignored the comment as he took mental muster of those here. The movement of the ship was less belowdecks. Of course, on the other hand, they were below the waterline. . . . He quickly changed thoughts. To drown before he sacrificed himself for Allah would be a great crime.

  “I said, I see you have found us.”

  Tamursheki’s eyes narrowed, his thick eyebrows bunching into an angry V. “Yes, I have been on the bridge with the Captain.”

  Tamursheki watched as the doctor lifted a hypodermic needle from the aluminum supply table beside the patients. Ibrahim pulled a small bottle from the metal chests, pushed the needle into it before lifting it to eye level to watch the liquid flow into it. He glanced over at Tamursheki. “You want one of these?” he asked, nodding toward the hypodermic needle.