The Ghost of Flight 666

by Christopher Anderson

  “This is the Champion Galaxus, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! We are a freighter enroute from Bandar Abbas to Jakarta with a cargo of sand for a children’s zoo! We are being threatened with destruction by the American submarine Key West! We request any and all assistance! American agents have already slain members of my crew! I repeat, this is the Champion Galaxus, Mayday!”

  Carrabolla was beside herself as images of Iranian crewmembers with bullet holes riddling their bodies and mouths stuffed with bacon plastered the airwaves. “Do you have any idea how bad this looks? Do you have any clue what this makes the United States look like?”

  “No one watches MSNBC Ms. Carrabolla,” General Mertzl said stoically.

  “It’s on every station!” she shot back. Turning to the director, she demanded an explanation, “The president demands an explanation. That’s your man on board the Galaxus isn’t it? He’s the one responsible for this outrage?”

  “Outrage?” the director said calmly. “Those very same Iranians slaughtered nine innocent crew members of the Galaxus! You saw the film from Slade, himself. Why don’t you counter with those videos and charges of piracy—why don’t you tell the truth to the world?”

  Carrabolla was momentarily disarmed, but said, “The Iranians beat us to the airwaves. No one would believe us.”

  “Agent Slade and the US Navy have discovered that Iran has pulled a fast one on the world—and the president—they’ve discovered where the three tons of enriched Uranium disappeared to and where it is heading. We now have the opportunity to solve this crisis once and for all by taking that ship or sinking it.”

  “In front of the world?” Carrabolla shouting. “Do you have any idea what a PR nightmare that would be? It would undo six years of trying to destroy the image of America the bully of the world!”

  “Would you rather deal with the PR nightmare of terrorists having that Uranium and using it?” the director said sternly.

  General Mertzl stepped forward and told her, “Captain Mars is ready to fire on the Galaxus and sink her. If you don’t want that on your conscience we have a Delta Force team ready to storm the ship and seize the Uranium. All we need is the president’s green light.”

  “The president has already given a statement denying any of this; he is not about to reverse his stance,” Carrabolla told them.

  “Where is he? I want to hear it from his own lips!” the general demanded. “We have a nuclear crisis on our hands. Al Qaeda is about to get their claws on three tons of Uranium! Is that what he wants as his legacy? Is that what you want as NSA?”

  “He’s given his orders. There is to be no action!”

  “Where is he? Where is the President of the United States?”

  The calm deadpan voice of the Director of the CIA informed the general, that, “The president is just now teeing off with a prominent basketball star.” He showed the data on his PDF to the general.

  “This is what our Commander in Chief does during a crisis?” the general stammered.

  “General Mertzl, with all due respects, the president is of the opinion that the nuclear cargo is at the bottom of the Straits of Hormuz. A submersible is in route to verify that. We should know in a few weeks exactly what happened to the cargo.”

  “What about Agent Slade’s discovery?” the director asked.

  “Agent Slade is in error,” Carrabolla said firmly.

  “What if he is not?”

  “He is in error,” she repeated. “There is absolutely no evidence to corroborate his accusation.”

  “We have the data from his test kit,” the director reminded her. “It conclusively identifies the presence of Uranium 235 in the containers.”

  “He identified contamination,” Carrabolla retorted. “Your agent had no opportunity to weight the containers or perform any other tests; we don’t even know if those tests were conducted on the containers in question.”

  “The data is irrefutable,” the director told her pointedly. “An investigation will show that you and the president are purposefully ignoring the facts.”

  Carrabolla looked stunned.

  “Why are you so dead set on believing the Iranians over your own people?” the general demanded. “What is it with you progressives?”

  “There is no reason to consider the word of the Iranians as inferior to the word of the military,” she told them. “That comes from the president himself.”

  They stared at her in shock.

  Carrabolla blushed at the assertion, and tried to downplay it by saying, “We all believe we’re speaking the truth but we all have different perceptions; I’m sure that’s all he means. The bottom line gentlemen is that the president needs surety and one agent isn’t going to give it to him. When the UN ascertains that the containers with the sunken freighter are not the containers in question, when the Uranium is truly missing, then he is willing to consider other options.

  “At the moment, the president is confident that we know where the Uranium is. It is secure on the bottom of the ocean waiting for us to retrieve it.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that we are once again going to do absolutely nothing, and you’re going to leave my agent hanging,” the director said.

  “Isn’t that his job?” Carrabolla said with a snide expression.

  “You better hope I don’t tell Agent Slade that,” the director told her.

  “Is that a threat?” Carrabolla said with fire in her eyes.

  “Ms. Carrabolla you’re not worthy of a threat from any of my agents, especially a patriot like Slade!” he said, unaware that at that very moment Jeremiah Slade was fighting for his life, and losing.

  CHAPTER 36: Taking the Bait

  Slade was trapped and he knew it; worse the Iranians knew it. He wasn’t quite sure how he got himself into this jam, running into a dead end, but he did. Now he had dozens of Iranians between himself and the only exit and they had him pinned down.

  What to do?

  He was in the ceiling, invisible, that was his only advantage. The cooling pipes and electrical ducts hid him from view and deflected the almost constant AK-47 fire coming from only a few meters away. That was his only advantage. His little P90 was a good gun unless it had to be stacked against about a dozen AK’s; then, it just wasn’t enough.

  What to do?

  Slade tried every trick in the book: taunting, staying quiet, diversion—nothing worked. They gave him no opening to move or to escape. He had nothing left as far as ammunition; only his knife. Now, to make matters worse, it was getting hard to breathe. The Iranians were throwing up so much fire that the burnt gunpowder took up more air than, well, air.

  Still they kept firing, and that, only that, was his salvation. Slade prayed, and after he finished an Our Father and three Hail Mary’s plus a Glory Be—glory be and halleluiah—he saw light come through the newest bullet holes in the ceiling.

  “Who taught you ladies how to shoot?” he yelled in Farsi.

  A hail of gunfire answered him, creating more light in the ceiling. The Iranians were actually throwing up so many 7.62 shells that they were shredding the steel plates in the floor above. That gave him an idea.

  Taking out his tungsten rotary saw, Slade began cutting the deck between the holes, all the while egging the Iranians on.

  “What’s the matter? Are your Burkas ruining your aim?”

  It kept coming.

  “Nikahd’s going to cut your balls off before he has you thrown to the sharks!”

  Actually, Nikahd had already done just that to two men. Desperation mixed with fury. Slade could feel the barrels melting beneath him. Yet above him an entire section of the floor looked like Swiss cheese. In an eruption of energy he braced himself on the heavy steel pipe that had been protecting him and shoved hard, squatting the floor plates above him, crashing through the floor to the deck above.

  Slade rolled off to the side as more bullets flew, but he wasn’t alone. Some enterprising Iranians had noticed the same thing he did. They’d climbed up to
the next deck in order to shoot down through the floor at Slade. Only now he was right in their midst.

  With surprise and animalistic fury on his side Slade and his knife made short work of the four Iranians who tried to surprise him. He couldn’t have recounted what he did, who he knifed first or where, it was all pure training and bestial instinct. Once finished he stood upon the trembling corpses of his kills, dully aware that bullets were thudding into the now dead bodies from below.

  That irritated him.

  Slade yanked grenades from the men’s vests and pulled their pins, tossing them down through the hole on the floor. Only when the screams and firing faded away with the drifting smoke did he stop.

  That chore done he thought nothing more of it. He didn’t consider how close to death he’d been. He didn’t consider how fortune intervened to save him from his own stupid mistake. Slade simply re-armed himself and disappeared into the maze of the ship. The war continued.

  Only later that evening after things died down did he realize that he’d been hit by ricochets and splinters. The firefight shredded his wetsuit and he had several bullets that penetrated through his skin. He plucked or dug them out, too worn out to feel pain, too desperate in his situation to care.

  His only real concern was having to go into the water if the ship were torpedoed. If he bled that would attract sharks. Slade did not want to be eaten after all this, he really didn’t. He hunkered down in the safest place he could think of: on top of the bridge where he could keep an eye on things.

  So it was that while an increasingly frustrated Nikahd directed the search for Slade, he was actually not more than a few meters away all the time.

  #

  The Galaxus continued to head east toward Jakarta, but it was no longer alone. The distress calls sent by Nikahd had their effect on the world at large. Few nations liked the United States. Jealousy had its affect but so did the inherent benevolence of the superpower; it was easy to hate a behemoth that for the most part refused to hit back. However, in a dangerous world, even fewer nations liked a weak United States—the beacon for freedom in the world simply could no longer be trusted. The Iranian freighter was now the underdog being threatened by a once benevolent giant.

  World opinion turned decidedly against America to the point where a president who was once reluctant to act now steadfastly refused to do anything at all. More to the point freighters in the nearby area joined up with the Galaxus, forming a convoy to protect the freighter. The Key West had to submerge and now remained a hidden menace.

  Slade saw all of this happening from his perch or heard it from the bridge bug. With growing frustration he realized the president wasn’t going to do anything about this. It looked as though only an act of God would stop the Iranians from delivering their deadly cargo to the waiting jihadists in Jakarta.

  What was he going to do; he couldn’t sink the ship? The only answer was to destroy the Uranium. The problem was, of course, that it couldn’t be destroyed. He could theoretically disperse it by blowing it up. Short of that there was really nothing he could do. That was the whole point of sinking it before they reached Jakarta.

  The only solution left was to take the ship.

  That was obviously a possibility that Nikahd considered. Slade was forced off of his perch on the bridge because Nikahd put a machine gun nest up there as well as snipers. The cargo hold for the Uranium was likewise protected by a double ring of troops twenty-four hours a day.

  Even if Slade had Killer and his Delta Force team it would be a hard, dangerous fight. He was in a quandary. As he put it to the director in his nightly communique—the Iranians stopped their jamming now that the world was interested in the plight of the Galaxus—Slade felt completely helpless. “I’m a hundred yards from the Uranium. It’s not a matter of finding it; it’s right there and I can’t figure out how to get to it.”

  “Don’t get yourself killed yet Slade,” the director cautioned. “We’re not that desperate. We still have a few days.”

  “Sir, I have one suggestion.”

  “We need any ideas you have,” the director admitted.

  “Rattle their cage. We’re trying to make it look like the Iranians are pulling a fast one; we’re trying to smear them and lessen their international power. Nikahd is gloating about turning the tables on us; let’s do it to him. Plant the bug in their ear that we really know those containers at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz are the real deal, but in order to de-stabilize Iran we’ve come up with this Galaxus scheme.”

  The director caught on. “Let the international community handle the rest; they’ll demand we expedite the recovery of the containers, expecting to expose our duplicity once and for all. In reality they’ll blow the Iranian scheme wide open. That will force the president’s hand—Slade that’s good, very good—say, you’re not after my job are you?”

  “Not under this president sir. I don’t have your self-control.”

  “You’ve a point there,” Gann admitted. “I’ll be in contact—stay alive!”

  #

  At the United Nations Ari Bernstein, the Chief of Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Agency, led the Israeli Ambassador to a place he knew the Turks had bugged—only the Turks didn’t know the Israeli’s knew the Turk’s had it bugged.

  It was a little corner in one of the café’s that served kosher food. The Israeli’s knew better than to say anything vital there unless they wanted the Arab world to know. Sometimes they threw the Turks a bone just to keep the location viable for something just like this.

  Ari, who had just gotten off the line with Director Gann, sat down with a huff, and said, “The Americans have sure mucked it up this time!”

  “How so?” an aide dutifully asked. “I thought the Galaxus thing was a smokescreen anyway. So no one bought it; they haven’t lost anything.”

  “They will lose a lot if the United Nations ever takes the trouble to check those containers. They made a big deal about the Iranians trying to maneuver that Uranium into the hands of terrorists. If the United Nations proves that the Uranium went down with the freighter the US will have more than egg on its face.”

  “No one will ever trust this administration again,” the ambassador shrugged. “Do they now?”

  “It’s not the administration, it’s the military,” Ari told him. “The president was never for this intervention. If he were smart, he’d demand an immediate salvage operation and discredit his own military.”

  “That would make him happy,” the ambassador nodded. “He doesn’t like military intervention anyway; this would give him an excuse to pull back even further on the world stage. That’s what he wants.”

  “The military is powerful, they have a huge lobby, but they’re scared.”

  “Why?”

  “Because their sub got the whole thing on tape—everything.”

  “The word is they tracked a midget sub to the Iranian freighter and then from there to Soekarno’s freighter—a really slick operation.”

  “Way beyond the Iranian’s capabilities,” Ari said dramatically. “The Americans tracked a midget sub into the convoy, yes, and then it suffered a malfunction. The poor Iranian’s were just looking for help when they ran into the Galaxus. They ended up beaching the boat on the coast. I don’t know what happened to the crew after that.”

  “Then what’s with this Galaxus story?”

  “A smokescreen to discredit the Iranians; to show how they pander to international terrorism, you know, knock them down a bit. They wanted the Deltas to board the vessel and plant the evidence; they didn’t count on the captain sending out a distress signal and the Iranians making a bloody international incident out of it before they boarded the freighter.”

  “So now if the Uranium is found at the bottom of the Straits of Hormuz?”

  “The US military exits stage left until the next administration,” Ari said soberly.

  “We need to block any attempt to search for those containers,” the ambassador said.

&
nbsp; “That would be exceedingly wise,” Ari agreed.

  #

  Later that same day the Turkish Ambassador to the United Nations demanded the United Nations Security Council follow up on the disaster in the Straits of Hormuz. They demanded the immediate recovery of the nuclear containers.

  The United Nations Security Council, eager for Iran to be proven correct and so put the United States in its place, voted on the resolution. Strangely, the United States abstained instead of vetoing the resolution to search for the cargo containers from the sunken freighter.

  President Oetari was surprisingly supportive considering the actions of the past week. As he said smugly to the press, “If my military is making mistakes, I need to know about it.”

  Slade noted an immediate change on board the Galaxus.

  Nikahd was furious. The colonel wasn’t concerned on ideological grounds; rather he knew the capabilities of the West. The President of Turkey wasn’t in the know on the Iranian nuclear swap; he was still a sympathizer not a collaborator. Turkey thought they were helping the Iranians; Nikahd knew better. He was horrified that the world might actually discover what the Americans already knew.

  Despite that, he consoled himself that any submersible capable of salvaging the containers was still weeks away. By then it would be too late. What Nikahd wasn’t counting on was a study being conducted by an environmental society. They were looking at the effects of the manmade Palm Islands on the sea bottom in the Persian Gulf. To accomplish that, they had an unmanned submersible that was taking samples and it was only fifty miles away.

  The environmentalists were just as eager to see the Americans put in their place and the Iranians vindicated, which was strange, for it was the Americans who were environmentally responsible and the Iranian who couldn’t care less how much oil they dumped in the oceans—one of the reasons for the environmental research team being in the Persian Gulf in the first place.

  Regardless of their misguided, emotional motivation, the environmentalists volunteered their vehicle to verify the Iranians claims. The Americans dutifully supplied the exact coordinates of the wreck and two days later the submersible was diving on the sight.