Death Wave

17

The bike ride up from Fatima to the crest of the towering ridge had been both exhausting and exhilarating. The view, certainly, was spectacular, with pine-clad mountains thrusting into the sky ahead, with a panorama of impossibly blue ocean and sweeping green and black coastline at their backs. They’d been pumping away with their bikes in the lowest possible gear for the last mile or so, their legs circling steadily as they barely made headway up the slope.

“We never got much of this sort of thing in Yorkshire,” CJ gasped. “I think I’ve been behind a desk for way too long.”

“Then it’s time you got out and got some exercise,” Lia told her. Her own legs were burning, however, with the unaccustomed exertion. She’d passed her physical quals at the CIA’s Farm near Williamsburg, an endurance-fitness test that included running for four miles — but that had been two months ago, and she hadn’t been doing anything nearly this strenuous since.

“I thought you James Bond types were supposed to be in peak physical shape,” Carlylse said. He was panting hard himself, though, and sweating heavily.

“That’ll be enough out of you, mister,” Lia told him. “You’re here strictly on sufferance — and until we figure out what to do with you.”

“I can think of several possibilities,” he said.

Lia ignored him. He’d been flirting heavily with her, or trying to, since yesterday. She wondered if he was capable of taking anything seriously at all.

CJ was in the lead. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Up ahead.”

“That’s the roadblock,” Carlylse confirmed.

“Same guards?”

“I don’t think so. Hard to tell.”

“Chances are they’re a different two. I imagine all tourists look alike to them anyway.”

The three cyclists brought their rented bikes to a halt as one of the sentries stepped out in front of them, hand waving them off. Carlylse had been right; they were carrying AK-74s, the updated 5.45 mm version of the older 7.62 mm AK-47. They wore a dirty mix of civilian clothing and army surplus cast-offs, and the beards gave them a less than military appearance. She couldn’t see any sign of an identifying badge or patch, and they certainly didn’t look like members of a private or corporate security firm.

“Alto,” the nearest of them said. “El camino está cerrado.”

“We’re meeting friends,” CJ said, also in Spanish. She pointed toward the left, toward the rugged skyline of the caldera on the north end of the island. “Over there. Can’t you just let us ride up that way, instead of having to go all the way around?”

“No. The road is closed.”

As CJ argued with the guards, Lia looked around, making mental notes. The sign was there, nailed to the trunk of a tree, proclaiming in English and in Spanish that the area was off- limits to tourists, courtesy of the Scientific Institute of Geological Research.

CJ was getting nowhere with the guards. “Come on, CJ,” Lia told her. “At least going back it’s all downhill.”

They turned their bikes and began walking them down the road. Lia heard one of the men make a guttural comment in what sounded like Arabic. The other snickered, then said, “Bintilkha-ta!”

Down the road and around a curve, they hid their bicycles behind a tumble of massive blocks of volcanic rock. Carlylse pointed up the steep slope. “That’s where I went, up there. That’s where I saw the helicopter.”

“Let’s do it,” Lia said.

The climb took them about five hundred feet up a steep slope of loose gravel. At first, they had trees and shrubs to grab hold of and help their ascent, but then they emerged into the open. “Keep low,” Lia warned the others, “and when you reach the top, stay flat on the ground. Don’t show your silhouette against the sky.”

They crawled the last thirty feet, reaching the rim of the crater at last. The crest was topped by scattered boulders and rocks, and they were able to find a spot from which they could peer down into the crater without being seen.

The landscape stretched out below and around them was utterly alien and other-worldly, sere and convoluted, a maze of boulders and broken ground. The crater looked like a tiny piece of the surface of the moon, a perfectly formed bowl of dark gray cinders. A few isolated pines grew inside the crater, but for the most part the caldera below was barren. At the bottom, however, a helicopter rested on a cleared patch of ground off to one side. Nearby were several tents, and at the center of the depression a black derrick jutted forty feet high. Even at a distance of over six hundred feet, the noise was jarring — the roar of a gasoline-powered generator, the pounding of a heavy mud pump, the grinding rasp of the turning drill string.

Lia extracted her binoculars from their case and switched the device on. “Okay, Art Room,” she said quietly, raising the eyepieces to her face. “Are you getting a picture?”

“It’s coming through perfectly, Lia,” Marie Telach replied. “What are we looking at?”

“This is the largest of the three craters that make up the top of Rejada Mountain, the one in the center. I’d estimate the floor at about a hundred and twenty feet below the crater rim.” Raising the binoculars, she focused on the opposite rim and checked the numbers appearing at the lower right of the image. “The crater is just over twelve hundred feet across, rim to rim. Siege? What’s our altitude?”

CJ was examining a small handheld unit. “Fifty-seven hundred feet.”

“Weather is clear, with a low layer of clouds off to the north, at the north end of the island …”

Lia continued reading off measurements and observations to the Art Room while panning the electronic binoculars back and forth, transmitting the images through the antenna in her belt. After showing the overall panorama, she zoomed in on the activity on the crater floor.

The helicopter was a Eurocopter EC145, a light utility aircraft used for transporting personnel or small cargos. Lia could see neither markings on its dark-olive fuselage nor weapons.

The drilling tower was positioned at the exact center of the crater. Lia could see half a dozen men working at the tower’s base, barechested and covered in grime. She wondered if Chatel was among them, then decided the Frenchman was a bit too aristocratic to get his hands that dirty.

Another paramilitary guard with an AK stood a few dozen feet away, watching the work.

“Get us a closer look at the drill pipe, will you?” Telach asked.

“Here you go.” Lia pressed a button on the side of the binoculars, zooming in even more. She held it on the central mechanism inside the derrick. The tubing appeared to be hexagonal rather than a cylinder, which surprised her.

“Okay,” Telach told her. “That’s fine. We need to see the approaches now, if you could manage it.”

“I don’t see any easy way down there,” Lia said over the radio link as she pulled back on the zoom and panned across the crater. “The inner slopes of the bowl are bare gravel, rock, and cinders. I can see one more … no, two more armed guards on the crater rim opposite from our position. There are poles set up around the drill site perimeter, with what look like floodlights. I suspect the crater walls are pretty brightly lit at night.”

She continued describing what she could see for another few minutes. Then CJ tapped her arm and pointed. Another guard was walking along the crater rim, three hundred feet away, but moving slowly in their direction. He was taking his time, his weapon slung, and he appeared bored. They hadn’t been seen yet.

“Okay,” she told the Art Room. “There’s a sentry coming. We’re going to move back downslope.”

Staying flat against the slope, they alternately slid and crawled down the side of the volcanic cone until they were again within the shelter of the pines. From there, they made their way farther down the hill until they returned to the place where they’d left their bikes.

“What now?” Carlylse asked. “Back to Fatima?”

“No,” Lia said. “I think we can follow some of these lower trails along the west flank of the ridge south. I want to see where else they have roadblocks — and to see if they have any more drill sites.”

“More pedaling?”

“More pedaling.”

“You know,” Carlylse said, “you spies are supposed to run around in souped-up Aston Martins and high-tech aircraft, not goddamned bicycles, for Christ’s sake.”

“We’ll take that under advisement, Mr. Carlylse. But the agency has had to cut back a lot lately. Budget constraints, you know.”

They mounted up and started back down the road.

“Good picture,” Dean said.

“Ought to be,” Captain Morrisey replied. “The hardware cost enough.”

Dean and Akulinin stood inside the CIC, the Combat Information Center, of the Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruiser Lake Erie, a darkened shipboard compartment every bit as high-tech as the Art Room back at Fort Meade. Large-screen monitors were everywhere, watched intently by Navy enlisted personnel, both men and women, seated at workstation consoles. Captain Morrisey had brought them down a few minutes ago, their security classifications taking them past several checkpoints manned by no-nonsense Marine guards.

The largest monitor display showed a high-def television image, an aerial view of a rust-streaked cargo ship. Her name, Yakutsk, could be read on her prow.

“I thought you’d want to see,” Morrisey said. He pointed. “It’s begun.”

Two small wooden boats were approaching the Yakutsk from astern, their outboard motors churning up frothing wakes. A crewman on the Yakutsk’s fantail appeared to be shouting, though there was no sound with the picture. He was holding an automatic rifle.

“Can we get a closer view?” Dean asked.

“Nothing easier.” Morrisey spoke with a technician at a nearby console, and the image zoomed in, focusing on the man on the Yakutsk’s fantail.

“What’s the range?” Akulinin wanted to know.

“Three miles,” Morrisey said.

“Do they know we’re watching?”

“I doubt it very much,” Morrisey replied. “The Fire Scout is small, and it’s stealthy. We could be a lot closer and they’d never see us.”

The remarkably high-quality pictures were being relayed from a MQ-8B Fire Scout, a Navy UAV. Dean had watched them launch the craft from the Erie’s helicopter deck earlier. The unmanned aircraft looked like an odd mix of helicopter and submarine, with a teardrop-shaped body and the rotors attached to what looked like a submarine’s conning tower. The craft was twenty-three feet long with a rotor diameter of just over twenty-seven feet, painted gray and weighing a ton and a half. It carried a sophisticated array of sensors and cameras that let it see in the dark or in bad weather, and was said to be able to zero in on the glowing tip of a man’s cigarette from five miles away.

The Fire Scout was the smartest robot in the Navy’s inventory, with the ability to take off, patrol, and land on the pitching deck of a ship at sea without help from a human teleoperator. Stealth characteristics gave it a tiny radar profile, and its engine and rotor noise had been suppressed to a fluttering whisper. Wth an endurance of over eight hours, it could silently stalk its assigned target without the enemy even knowing it was there.

The man on the Yakutsk suddenly raised his AK to his shoulder and fired a burst down at the water, the picture sharp enough to show spent casings flash in the sunlight as they spun across the deck. A technician in the Erie’s CIC panned the image on the big screen to focus on one of the pursuing boats. A man in a ragged T-shirt and jeans had just stood up in the pitching craft, an RPG balanced on his shoulder. In the next instant, there was a puff of smoke from the back of the tube, flaring out over the water, and the warhead streaked toward the ship’s fantail.

The technician pulled the view back then, just in time to show the silent flash of the grenade exploding on the Yakutsk’s deck. The gunman there pitched backward and sprawled on the deck, dead or badly wounded. The pursuing boats, meanwhile, had drawn up to either side of the cargo vessel’s stern, and the men on board were unshipping ladders with hooks on the ends. Dean watched, fascinated, as the men hooked the ladders against the ship’s side and began swarming up onto the deck.

“Do you ever get the feeling,” Akulinin said, “that it’s 1801 all over again?”

“Barbary Pirates,” Dean said, nodding. “Only this time they’re Somali.”

“We beat them back then,” Morrisey said. “We could do it again if the damned politicians would let us.”

In 1801 through 1805, and then again in 1815, the young United States Navy had fought two wars against the Muslim city-states on the North African coast. Two hundred years later, Somalian fishermen had discovered it was more profitable to hunt for ships both close inshore and in international waters, board them, and hold ships, cargos, and crews for ransom. Most of the vessels targeted had been cargo ships like the Yakutsk, though the pirates had also begun capturing yachts and pleasure craft as well. As in the early 1800s, countries were finding out that paying the ransoms encouraged more and more attacks — but the lack of anything like a real government in Somalia meant that there were no courts where captured pirates could be tried, no venue for enforcing international law.

Realists like captain Morrisey, repeated pointed out that shooting captured pirates and sinking their boats would stop piracy in these waters in fairly short order. The international community, however, was unable to embrace what they saw as murder; most European states had long since abolished the death penalty, and summarily executing pirates went beyond the pale. While capital punishment was still legal in the United States, the government was not about to permit executions on the high seas, not when such measures would bring a storm of protest from the comfortable politically correct. So piracy and murder were subsidized and encourage by governments unwilling to meet force with force.

The pirates were all on board the Yakutsk now, racing along the decks. There appeared to be about fifteen of them, heavily armed with rifles and RPGs. Dean and the others aboard the Erie watched as a bearded man stepped out of a watertight door in the ship’s superstructure brandishing an AK assault rifle, only to be shot down by the boarders.

“Is this all going out to the Puzzle Palace?” Dean asked. Their implants and belt antennae didn’t work here within the shielded and electronically protected confines of the Aegis cruiser’s CIC.

“Absolutely,” Morrisey told him. “They’re seeing this at the same time we are, with maybe a half-second delay off the satellite.”

“Good.”

“And Ocean Storm is set to go?”

“Affirmative. The Constellation is getting this feed, too.”

Dean nodded. All of the pieces were in place.

As the Yakutsk had traveled farther and farther west, eventually entering the two-hundred-mile gap between the island of Socotra and the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the carrier battle group shadowing it had begun closing the range. The Lake Erie now was just under twenty nautical miles southeast of the Yakutsk, while the aircraft carrier USS Constellation was about thirty miles from the target. The Yakutsk’s radar likely was picking up both the Erie and the Constellation, as well as the other surface ships of the battle group, but these were crowded waters, with international sea traffic funneling in toward the narrow mouth of the Red Sea. With luck, the Erie had been dismissed as another freighter, the Constellation as a supertanker out of the Arabian Gulf. Not that secrecy was of particular importance now. The Yakutsk’s Russian crew would very soon be learning the truth, as would the pirates attacking them.

“Can we have some more detail there?” Dean asked, pointing toward the cargo ship’s deck amidships, just forward of the superstructure. A gun battle had broken out between the pirates and a small group of shipboard defenders.

“Those don’t look much like sailors,” Morrisey commented. “They don’t even look like merchant seamen.”

“Probably JeM,” Dean said, thoughtful. “Pakistanis riding shotgun on the nukes.”

“Makes sense that the JeM wouldn’t let such a valuable cargo go unprotected. The Russian seamen don’t care if the bad guys get the cargo. It’s in their best interests to just surrender and let the ship’s owners ransom them.”

“How many men in the Yakutsk’s crew?” Dean asked.

“About twenty,” Morrisey told him.

“Plus an unknown number of Pakistani gunmen. The pirates have their work cut out for them.”

“Captain Morrisey?” a sailor said from a nearby console. “We’re getting an SOS from the ship.”

“Record it, Tompkins,” Morrisey told her, “and transmit to both Citadel and Xanadu.” Citadel was the code name for the Constellation; Xanadu was Fort Meade.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Okay,” Dean said, relieved. “We now have official permission to board that ship.”

Permission to board and search the Yakutsk for the missing nukes had been repeatedly refused by the White House. Dean didn’t know for sure, but he strongly suspected that Bill Rubens was behind this somehow — a hint, a suggestion, in the right diplomatic ear might have gotten the Yakutsk noticed by the Somali pirates. If the United States Navy was not permitted to search a Russian cargo ship on the high seas, international maritime law required nearby ships to come to the aid of that vessel if it sent out a distress message. Rubens had told him to keep a close eye on the ship from the Erie’s CIC and stand by to coordinate a Navy SEAL assault — Ocean Storm — from the Constellation.

It was almost as if Rubens had somehow known that the Yakutsk was going to be attacked by pirates.

“Citadel has acknowledged,” Tompkins said, “and requested permission to deploy Ocean Storm.”

Dean nodded. “Go,” he said.

The leading chief, Senior Chief Petty Officer Carl Raleigh, came to his feet. “Attention on deck!”

“Okay, ladies!” Lieutenant Commander Edward McCauley said as he walked into the compartment on board the USS Constellation. “As you were!” The men took their seats again, chairs scraping and clattering as they settled. “We have the word,” McCauley continued. “We are go for VBSS!”

“Hoo-yah!”

Forty voices shouted back, ringing off the bulkheads of the compartment designated as the SEAL Team squad bay. The men, dressed in black and with their faces painted green, were members of Alfa Troop, SEAL Team Three, headquartered in Coronado, California; their operational area was Southwest Asia, which included the Gulf of Aden. They’d deployed to the Constitution from Kuwait two days ago, under orders passed down from SOCOM, the U.S. Special Operations Command. Since that time, they’d been on a constant state of alert, waiting for the order to go.

“The objective of this op is to secure the ship, which is believed to be illegally transporting a number of small tactical nuclear devices. We do not have to worry about finding those devices. That is the job of the NEST people who will be following us in. Our job is to get on board that ship, take down the hostiles, and hold it so the techies can do their thing.

“We are clear to use lethal force. The hostiles on board include Somali pirates and members of a Muslim terror group, the Army of Mohammad. In addition, it’s possible that the members of the ship’s crew may offer resistance.

“Be very clear about this, people. While we have no wish to cause unnecessary casualties among the ship’s crew, while it would be useful to capture hostile personnel for interrogation, this is a shoot-first order. If anyone shows a weapon, if anyone offers resistance, if anyone even looks like he’s going to give you an argument, take him down, and take him down hard! The number one objective here is to secure those nukes, not to save lives on that ship, not to take prisoners. You have one order on this op. Secure those weapons! Questions?”

A hand went up, and McCauley nodded. “Petroski?”

“I was just wondering, sir … is there any chance of those nukes going off?”

“Beats me, Pet. What I was told was that it takes twenty minutes to prep one of these weapons, to arm it and set it off. If they do manage to detonate one … well, the good news is we’ll never know it, and the bastards won’t be able to use them against civilian targets. Other questions? Right. Let’s move out!”

“Hoo-yah!”

The SEAL battle cry rang again from the bulkheads as the men began filing out into the next compartment, the armory, where they drew weapons, ammunition, and various items of special gear. Minutes later, they stepped out into the glare of the afternoon sun above the Gulf of Aden, hurrying across the steel flight deck to the waiting helicopters.

“Now hear this, now hear this,” blared from the 1MC. “Commence helicopter operations on the flight deck.”

The rotors on the big HH-60H helos began to turn.

On the big main display in the Art Room, Rubens saw the image of the Yakutsk being relayed by satellite from the USS Lake Erie. The Yakutsk was just over 240 feet in length and thirty-six feet wide, with a draft of twelve and a half feet. Her bridge house was positioned amidships, just forward of the single, large stack. There were two tall masts, one aft of the stack, one just aft of the raised forecastle forward. Stays and rigging connected the two masts with one another and with various points on the deck and bulwarks.

Those masts and stays could be a problem.

“The first helicopters are away, sir,” a technician reported.

“Good,” Rubens said. “What’s their ETA?”

“Range to the target is now twenty-five nautical miles. The first helos should be over the target in ten minutes, thirty seconds.”

“Very well.”

This was where the real worrying began. The SEALs and Navy Special Warfare helicopters were now committed to attack a Russian ship, and the hell of it was that the action probably would not have been approved by the White House. Rubens had set up this scenario to respond to the ship’s SOS, a tenuous legal fiction. If this went badly, it would mean an international incident, and Rubens would be forced to resign at best, face criminal charges at worst.

Nevertheless, he didn’t see any other way to get the job done.

A pitched gun battle was being waged on the decks of the freighter, covertly observed by the shadowing Fire Scout. As the observers on board the

Erie watched, three more speedboats pulled up, and more pirates stormed aboard. The defenders were being forced forward. RPG blasts ripped across the Yakutsk’s forward deck, and bodies sprawled in untidy heaps.

“I hope to hell your boss knows what he’s doing,” Captain Morrisey said. “If he doesn’t, we might be about to start a war with Russia.”

“Shit,” Akulinin said, “the SEALs board the ship, grab the nukes, and get the hell out. What could possibly go wrong?”

“More than I care to think about right now,” Morrisey said. “Why didn’t they just send in CTF 151 and let them sort this out?”

Since January of 2009, Combined Task Force 151 had been patrolling the Gulf of Aden. Led by the United States with the USS Boxer as the flagship, it included vessels from fourteen nations. Many, like China and Russia, were only there to escort their own ships, but the rest, including the American contingent, had been aggressively attempting to suppress piracy in the area. Hampered by bureaucracy and by the pirates’ ability to vanish into Somalian coastal waters masquerading as fishing boats, the international force had so far achieved mixed results.

“I think the people back home running this op wanted an all-American force, Captain,” Charlie Dean told him. “Fewer complications that way. They probably also think it better to keep the Russians out of the loop for as long as they can. The Yakutsk is Maltese-flagged, so the Russians aren’t in there escorting her, but if they knew what was about to go down, they would not be happy about it.”

“I’m not sure I’m happy about it,” Morrisey said. “But if we bloody some pirate noses, I won’t mind one bit.”

“I think we can count on that, Captain. Right now, though, my partner and I have to get in there.”

“The helo is warmed up and waiting for you,” Morrisey told him. “Good luck … and don’t get yourself shot.”

Charlie Dean and Ilya Akulinin left the Erie’s CIC, heading aft.