The Ghost of Flight 666

CHAPTER 35: The Galaxus Game

Iranians spilled out onto deck armed and angry, driven by Colonel Nikahd’s fury. The launch of the lifeboat was automatically relayed to the bridge and the Iranian colonel was none too happy about it. When he discovered that all of his hostages were gone he was livid.

The two deck guards were thrown overboard — alive.

The rest of the troops were mustered on deck. They began a painstaking search of the ship. From the announcements Nikahd made over the ships address system, Slade thought Nikahd suspected someone other than Christian Fletcher and his crew but he couldn’t confirm it. So began a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

With almost two hundred men at his disposal, Nikahd could have someone in every section of the ship at once; this made it difficult on Slade, but the darkness helped. He was nearly invisible in his wetsuit. That was good, because Slade couldn’t just hide. Soon after the search started the Galaxus turned south. It took him a few minutes to figure out why. When the engines revved and the Galaxus picked up speed he finally figured it out: Nikahd was after the lifeboat.

The lifeboat was a marvel of modern engineering. It was completely self-contained with its own propulsion system, food, water, and with the ability to right itself if capsized by a wave. It was a true lifeboat, but it wasn’t a speed boat. The one thing the lifeboat could not do was to outrun its mothership. The mothership was supposed to be sinking or sunk; it wasn’t supposed to be tracking the lifeboat with radar and trying to run it down.

That’s exactly what the Galaxus was doing.

Slade intervened, shooting the thick cable running from the radar to the bridge. That effectively blinded the Galaxus; but it also told Nikahd he had a saboteur on board.

Despite the ardent searches Slade made it through the night without any serious encounters but when the Sun dawned things changed.

Slade went below deck, taking refuge in the labyrinth of corridors and storerooms, ductwork and mechanical shafts in the huge ship. He didn’t go deep into the ship, however, because in the back of his mind was the Key West. If Slade were in charge he’d torpedo the freighter, and that thought kept him thinking escape. Of all things that were possible Slade didn’t want to end his career or his life going down with a ship. The thought of drowning in the dark, trapped in the bowels of the Galaxus, sent shivers down his spine.

Possibly to cover his growing unease, or possibly because Slade hated being hunted with no repercussions, Slade took advantage of his situation and turned the table on the Iranians at every opportunity.

When dawn came Nikahd ascertained the position of the lifeboat visually. He came ten points to starboard and ordered the engines full speed ahead. “We’ll ram them! So much for their escape!”

The crew abandoned their search to gather on the bow, eager to watch the destruction of the recalcitrant crew. Everything went according to plan until they closed within a thousand yards of the lifeboat. Nikahd was looking at the lifeboat through his binoculars when the water to the right boiled and turned white.

A great black tower broke the surface of the water followed by the smooth black hull of what could only be an American attack submarine. The boat launched out of the water, pointing directly at the tanker.

A message came over the radio over the international emergency frequency. “Champion Galaxus! Champion Galaxus, this is the USS Key West! Turn away from the lifeboat or we will fire on you and sink you! This will be your only warning!”

“Ram them!” yelled Nikahd’s lieutenant.

Nikahd back handed the officer across the face, knocking him to the deck. The helmsman looked stunned and the ship kept barreling toward the lifeboat. Nikahd shoved the helmsman aside and turned the rudder hard over, veering back east and away from the Key West.

The lieutenant got up, fuming. “You’re letting them get away!”

Nikahd drew his sidearm and shot the man in the face. He glared at everyone else on the bridge. “Does anyone else want to disobey Ayatollah Hayayi’s directives and jeopardize our Holy mission?” When no one spoke up, he said, “Good! Helmsman, steer course one-six-zero degrees. Speed twelve knots!”

“Yes sir!” the helmsman said, taking over.

He told his guards to remove the body of his lieutenant and then promoted the next man in line. Then came a call over his handheld radio.

“Colonel Nikahd, we are in the captain’s cabin; I think you need to see this sir!”

“On my way!” he said curtly. He hurried off the bridge with his private guard of four men. When he reached the cabin at the aft end of the superstructure, there were a dozen soldiers gathered there, murmuring and looking at the bed.

On the bed were four soldiers. Their mouths were stuffed with bacon. The men looked on in horror, imagining themselves humiliated in such a way.

Nikahd ran his hand through his hair, and said, “Our intruder has a strange sense of humor; a Western sense of humor.”

Another call came over the radio. Another man’s voice called for his attention. “Colonel Nikahd, sir, you will want to see this. We are amidships on the starboard side.”

“On my way,” he said curtly, but he was thinking, “Now what?”

When Nikahd got there a dozen men were leaning over the side of the ship. He gazed at what they saw, reading aloud, “Uranium 235! He knows!” He looked up at the long black shape of the Key West, pacing them as they sailed southeast. “The submarine knows as well! By Allah, why haven’t they torpedoed us?”

Nikahd returned to the bridge. The Key West stayed abeam at about fifteen hundred meters. Nikahd was thunderstruck. “They know what we have on board but they haven’t destroyed us; that can only mean one thing: they are awaiting orders! They need permission to fire on a civilian vessel.”

“What do we do colonel?” his new lieutenant asked.

“We make sure their weak willed president will not give them permission to fire! Put me on the emergency frequency for satellite, High Frequency and Very High frequency radios!” he replied. Snatching up the microphone he began issuing a distress call.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, this is the cargo vessel Champion Galaxus! We are at the following coordinates. We are transporting sand to Jakarta for a children’s zoo, but an American submarine, the Key West has threatened us with destruction. They are following us now. We request immediate assistance! Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”

When he finished Nikahd grinned. “Now let the Key West sink us! The president doesn’t have the balls to sink us!”

He turned back to his new lieutenant. “Broadcast that message every ten minutes. Continue the search! Bring me this Crusader alive! We will make sport of him by carving the Crescent of the Prophet on his chest before dispatching him by the Prophet’s own direction! We will sail into Jakarta with our cargo intact, our place in paradise assured and this Crusader’s head mounted on the bow of our ship!”

In the Situation Room Ms. Carrabolla stared down the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of the CIA. She pointed to the news report on the president’s favorite news channel, MSNBC. They were playing the distress call of the Galaxus.

“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.