Bioweapon

by James Barrington

  Abdul shook his head.

  ‘They’re not my problem,’ he said. ‘They’re staying with their ship.’

  Abdul took a small two-way out of his pocket and pressed a button on it. Moments later a voice issued from the small speaker, using a language Zebari couldn’t speak but did recognise as Persian. Abdul responded immediately, apparently issuing instructions.

  Seconds later, three of his men unslung their assault rifles and began checking their magazines. Bearing in mind the last remark Abdul had made about the crew of the other ship, it wasn’t exactly rocket science to work out what he had just ordered. Zebari knew he had to act fast.

  The trans-shipment had taken less time than he had expected. They hadn’t been able to accurately predict anything that had happened after the two ships came alongside each other, and Richter and Moloch had just said he would have to play it by ear, which was an appropriate expression because he really would be their eyes and ears. He just had to wait for an opportunity, the right moment, and take it from there.

  And it looked to Zebari as if the right moment might actually be more or less right then.

  ‘There’s a ship approaching,’ he said, gesturing ahead of the Muttrah, where a small cargo vessel was visible about three miles away. ‘I’m required to sound a warning, as we’re stationary.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He sounded the fog horn, just once, and for less than a second. That should be enough.

  ‘That’s it?’ Abdul asked. He was clearly not a seaman, or not a seaman familiar with nautical signals.

  ‘That’s it,’ Zebari agreed. ‘That’s the standard warning signal. That’s all I needed to do.’

  As Abdul walked out onto the bridge wing to look at the deck below, Zebari hoped that it really had been enough.

  Chapter 58

  MV Muttrah, Red Sea

  Tuesday

  Zebari stared out at the bridge wing to make sure he had time, that Abdul was still out there, then stepped off the bridge into his day cabin, quickly opened the safe and took out a nine-millimetre Browning semi-automatic pistol. He checked that the magazine was loaded, pulled back the slide to chamber a round and stuffed the weapon into the rear waistband of his trousers, checking first that the safety catch was on. He hadn’t been lying to Abdul, because there was another pistol – a Berretta – in the safe as well. He’d just been economical with the truth. He had two pistols, not just one.

  Then he stepped off the bridge and made his way cautiously but as fast as he could down the internal staircase, the pistol now in his hand and the safety catch released.

  He was heading for a place he had hoped he would never, ever have to use in his career as a seaman officer, but now it really was the only space on the ship he could go.

  There are a surprisingly large number of spaces where a man can be concealed on even a fairly small ship: not just cabins but machinery spaces, kitchens, pantries, cold stores, mess rooms, bathrooms, lavatories, general store rooms, equipment lockers, voids, holds, passageways and staircases and all the rest. Finding suitable nooks and crannies where a dozen people could hide themselves from view hadn’t been that difficult.

  In their various hiding places, the SEALs had prepped their assault rifles, checked their spare magazines and their handguns, and then just waited for the go signal, a noise they knew they’d hear wherever they were on board the vessel.

  The moment the fog horn sounded, nine SEALs and two CIA officers eased themselves out of concealment and began making their way towards their pre-briefed positions. Two of them didn’t have that far to go. One emerged from a closed steel door on the back of the accommodation section, while the second stepped out of a much smaller locker near the bow. Both men took up concealed positions from which they could see down the starboard side of the Muttrah where it was secured to the port side of the other ship. Then they aimed their Heckler & Koch 416 assault rifles at the group of Iranians and let their fellow soldiers know where they were.

  ‘Sierra One in position.’

  ‘Sierra Two in position.’

  Moloch double-clicked his transmit button in acknowledgement.

  Richter didn’t have far to go either. He had tucked himself away in Zebari’s tiny sea cabin or, to be accurate, in the adjacent and even smaller shower room-cum-lavatory and stepped back into the sea cabin less than a second after the captain had sounded the fog horn. He’d waited there while Zebari had collected his weapon.

  ‘They’re going to kill the crew of the other ship,’ the captain whispered as he opened the safe and then left the bridge.

  Richter stayed in the shower room, his Heckler & Koch tucked behind the door, and listened intently to the exchanges of radio calls through the earpiece Moloch had supplied. Then he made a transmission once he knew the snipers were in position.

  ‘Sierras from Richter. They intend killing the crew of the other ship. Take out anyone who tries it.’

  ‘Roger.’

  Moments later, Abdul stepped back onto the bridge.

  ‘Zebari?’ he demanded, looking around at the deserted command position. ‘Zebari? Where are you?’

  Richter waited until the Iranian had turned his back to the sea cabin door, then stepped out.

  Whether he made a noise or if the other man somehow sensed that he was no longer alone Richter would never know, but as he closed to a distance of about four or five feet the Iranian swung round, the muzzle of the pistol in his right hand looking for a target.

  Richter could have shot him there and then but he wanted the man alive and talking, not dead, so he took his finger off the trigger of his Glock and powered straight into him as he turned, slamming into the man. He smashed the Iranian back against the bridge windows and swung his own pistol at the side of the man’s head like a club.

  But Abdul had obviously learned his trade as a street fighter, saw it coming and ducked under the blow. At the same instant, he pulled the trigger of his weapon, but Richter was so close to him that the bullet passed harmlessly a few inches behind his back.

  Before he could adjust his aim, Richter continued the swing with his right hand and smashed the butt of his Glock into Abdul’s right forearm.

  The Iranian howled with pain and his pistol clattered to the floor of the bridge. But he recovered instantly, ignoring the fallen weapon and driving his left arm, the edge of his hand held rigid, straight towards Richter’s throat. If the blow had connected that would have been the end of it, because it would have smashed his windpipe.

  But that wasn’t Richter’s first rodeo either, and he blocked the Iranian’s attack with his own left hand, deflecting the blow to one side. And then he reversed the direction his right hand was moving in and swung it with as much force as he could, aiming his Glock at the right side of Abdul’s face.

  This time, the Iranian couldn’t duck.

  The butt of the pistol slammed into his jaw and he toppled sideways, unconscious.

  ‘Bastard,’ Richter muttered, bending down to pick up the pistol Abdul had dropped and tucking it into his waist band. It was a Glock 17, the kind of steady and reliable workhorse pistol found almost everywhere these days. Even the British police carried Glocks.

  He reached down and pressed his fingers against the carotid artery in the man’s neck. The pulse was good and strong, which was what he had hoped.

  He rolled the unconscious Iranian onto his front, pulled his arms behind him and secured his wrists with two cable ties that he pulled tight and repeated the treatment on the man’s ankles. Then he turned him round and lay him against the bulkhead at the front of the bridge.

  Moments later, as Richter stood a few feet away, watching the activity below, the Iranian began to come around, and within about half a minute his eyes were fully open. He visibly tested his bonds, then stopped moving and stared balefully at Richter.

  ‘The captain had to step out for a moment,’ Richter said in English. ‘And now he’s tucked himself away where you’ll never get to him. You do
speak English, don’t you? If you don’t, I’m just going to have to kill you right now.’

  ‘I do speak English,’ Abdul said, his words slightly slurred due to the effects of the blow he’d taken to his jaw. He spat out a gobbet of blood and what was probably a piece of tooth. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Who I am doesn’t matter,’ Richter said.

  ‘No, it probably doesn’t, because there are almost twenty of us and only one of you. So no matter who you are or what you do, you’ve just signed your own death warrant.’

  ‘That’s not necessarily true,’ Richter said, ‘because I brought a few friends along with me.’

  * * *

  On the deck below, the three Iranian soldiers walked over towards the gunwale, their Kalashnikovs at the ready, looking forward to taking out some easy targets that wouldn’t be able to shoot back.

  Richter heard the radio exchange which meant that wasn’t going to happen.

  ‘Sierra One from Two. I’ll take the first and third. The other one’s yours. Okay?’

  ‘Roger.’

  A couple of crewmen from the crippled ship were on deck, probably doing something essentially pointless bearing in mind it was probably sinking, a task as fruitless as re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. One of the Iranian soldiers pointed at them and said something, and his two companions laughed.

  Then he moved the fire selector lever on the right-hand side of the Kalashnikov all the way down, to the semi-automatic position, and raised the weapon to his shoulder.

  As he did so, and his two companions mirrored his action, lifting their own weapons to take aim, two shots ripped through the quiet of the evening, so close together they sounded like a single report. He collapsed sideways, dead even before his head smashed into the deck. At the same time, the second of the soldiers fell in the opposite direction, again killed instantly. The last soldier stood there by the gunwale for a bare half-second, his world instantly ripped apart by the totally unexpected shots and by shock, and then Sierra One’s second bullet tore his heart to pieces.

  On the other ship, the crewmen ran for cover.

  Down on the deck, the Iranian soldiers had reacted almost immediately as the echoes of the shots died away. They knew they were under attack, obviously, but they didn’t know who by, where from or why. The Iranians, professional soldiers to a man and all of whom had been in active combat many times before, ducked down into cover. As they began looking for targets they knew one thing for certain: they weren’t facing a couple of crew members armed with revolvers or rifles. The shots had been too accurately placed and too fast for that. Whoever had pulled the triggers – and there had to have been at least two of them – were professionals. They were troops of some sort.

  They also knew that the shots had come from two different directions, simply because of the way the bodies of their fellow soldiers lay sprawled on the deck. That meant two snipers, one near the bow and the other at the stern of the ship.

  In the absence of their officer – he was still up on the bridge – the senior Non-Commissioned Officer took charge, urgently issuing crisp orders. Two men were to make their way to the bow to find and eliminate the sniper there, while two others headed for the stern, around the back of the accommodation section to do the same thing to the other man.

  Almost for the first time, the NCO noticed that none of the ship’s crew members were visible anywhere on deck, He hadn’t seen where they went, but they must have headed into the vessel’s superstructure. He called out the names of four of his men.

  ‘Find the crew,’ he ordered. ‘They must be hiding in the accommodation section. Find some of them, drag them out here and stick your pistols in their faces. We need hostages, human shields, and we need them right now. The rest of you, spread out and check every centimetre of this ship. Move it.’

  Chapter 59

  MV Muttrah, Red Sea

  Tuesday

  Up to that point, it had all gone more or less as Richter and Moloch had expected. And then suddenly the plan fell off the rails.

  The Iranians had reacted far faster and far more competently than the SEALs had expected. Although the weaponry the two sides possessed was similar, the American troops were outnumbered and, in any conflict, numbers matter. On the main deck, the Iranians were perceptibly gaining the upper hand because there were enough of them for one to provide covering fire while his companion moved, and they were starting to out-flank the SEALs, trying to catch them in a cross-fire. And it looked to Richter as if they were going to succeed.

  He stepped out onto the bridge wing, aimed his Heckler & Koch MP5 towards a couple of the Iranians who were looking for targets and looking for trouble, and squeezed off a short burst. Firing at targets that are much higher or lower than the shooter is something of an art, an art that Richter had never really mastered. So he wasn’t entirely surprised that his shots missed. Both Iranians ducked to one side, moving in opposite directions to present two targets.

  If he had managed to hit them, it would have been a bonus, but what he was actually trying to do was draw their attention. And in that he succeeded.

  Almost instantly, the two soldiers opened up with their Kalashnikovs, aiming at the bridge, and were immediately joined by at least two other men. On the bridge, Richter was immune to the barrage, the steel plating of the ship and the armoured glass of the windows – strengthened against the worst of the weather rather than the impact of bullets, though the result was much the same – deflecting their rounds without any problems. But what he’d done meant that they were looking in the wrong direction when two of the SEALs popped up from behind one of the two half-sized steel shipping containers on the deck and started picking them off.

  Then the tide of battle started to turn the other way.

  * * *

  The four soldiers who’d entered the accommodation section were getting nowhere. Every cabin and space they entered, weapons at the ready, was deserted. The ship’s crew had to be hiding somewhere, obviously, but they’d neither seen nor heard anything of them since they’d cautiously filed in through the outer steel door.

  Then they did hear something – footsteps from the deck above – and instantly tensed, aiming their AK-47s up the stairs as they prepared to move.

  Then they heard something else. A kind of rhythmic metallic thumping, getting closer, followed by the unmistakable sound of a door slamming shut.

  And then they realised their luck had just run out. A grenade dropped the last few steel steps towards them, followed about a second later by another one. The weapons bounced to a stop side-by-side on the steel plating of the deck, and before any of them could react – not that there was anything they could do, because they were completely exposed with nowhere to hide – they both detonated virtually simultaneously.

  Those four Iranians were the lucky ones.

  * * *

  A full-scale firefight was still raging on the deck. The Iranians, less the three soldiers who’d been taken down in the first barrage, had taken shelter wherever they could – and there were countless heavy steel structures they could use as shields, including the deck crane and the cargo of steel drums they’d trans-shipped – while the SEALs were still using the shipping containers as defensive positions.

  Both groups were well protected, so firing was sporadic because there was no point in shooting at a man you couldn’t see behind a wall of steel. The other problem was directly related to that one: whenever a weapon was fired, it wasn’t just the bullet both sides had to worry about, but the ricochets. A copper-jacketed round slamming into a steel plate sent needle-sharp shards of metal flying in all directions, and getting hit by them was just as painful, and could be almost as dangerous, as a wound caused directly by a bullet.

  Both the Iranians and the SEALs were taking casualties, but the Iranians now had to cope with their enemies on the deck as well as firing from the bridge, and Richter’s actions had managed to fatally divert their attention. He could see that a couple of the SEAL
s had been wounded, but were still firing, while at least half a dozen of the Iranian soldiers lay unmoving on the deck, the dark pools of blood beneath their bodies telling the tale.

  * * *

  Inside the accommodation section, two SEALs ran down the staircase a couple of seconds after the grenades had detonated, only carrying their SiG P226 pistols.

  The scene that greeted them was more or less what they’d expected. No blood and guts and dead bodies, just four shocked and incapacitated men trying to recover from the near-simultaneous explosions of two stun grenades, their effect grossly magnified by the confined space in which the detonations had taken place.

  The SEALs quickly removed the pistols and Kalashnikovs from the men, and then used their ubiquitous plastic cable ties to secure their wrists and ankles, making sure they weren’t going to be able to move when they finally came round.

  * * *

  Ragged volleys of shots sounded at both ends of the ship as the two snipers and the Iranians sent to kill them exchanged fire. The advantage was with the snipers, because their attackers didn’t know where the SEALs had taken up position, and there was no proper cover the Iranians could use to get close to them.

  The result was never in doubt, and that just magnified the problems the Iranians faced because the snipers had another plan.

  The two ships were still tied together, side-by-side and, as soon as the SEAL snipers had disposed of the men sent after them, they both hopped over onto the other ship, found themselves vantage points in the superstructure and then began picking off targets on the Muttrah the moment they had clear shots.