The Ghost of Flight 666

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.

“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.

One day out of Jakarta, while Slade was wracking his brains trying to think of some way to disable the ship, the environmentalist submersible succeeded in attaching a flotation balloon to one of the three cargo containers. It floated to the surface and was retrieved by the environmental ship which now had the original United Nations inspectors on board.

So confident was the UN and its officials that they agreed to televise the inspection live with news agencies around the world reporting on their every move. There was a party atmosphere on the ship. The inspectors, lined up in their white anti-radiation suits, were treated like astronauts. They were all miked up and more than willing to talk much more than the occasion allowed.

The inspectors looked over the container minutely, pronouncing it sound. All the sensors were in place and there was no evidence of a radiation leak or of seawater leaking into the container. It was pronounced intact.

They weighed it and confirmed that the container weighed exactly what it should. A cheer went up from the environmentalists; America was going down!

The second test was the residual radiation around the container. The inspectors warned the reporters that it should be low — it was — another cheer. Even the reporters were getting into the mood now.

The real test, however, was to open the access panel and sample the atmosphere within the container, just as Slade had done. With exaggerated thoroughness the inspectors opened the panel. They then held up the detector for all to see before plugging it onto the nipple and opening the valve allowing a sample of the inner atmosphere within the container to enter the detector. Closing the valve, again after allowing the cameras to record every movement along the way, the chamber in the detector filled with the gases in the container. Finally they unhooked the detector, took it out of the access panel and read the data aloud.

“The atmosphere inside the container shows — what?” the chief inspector started to read triumphantly. He stopped and showed it to his colleague, muttering aloud, “This can’t be right. There’s radiation but at much lower levels than we expect; and there’s absolutely no indication of Uranium 235 or even Uranium 238 at all. There’s no Uranium period.”

“What’s in there?” a reporter yelled.

The inspectors looked at each other and shrugged, but the chief inspector said, “We won’t know until we open it, but these levels are consistent with one ton of radioactive medical waste. We deal with that all the time.”

“Where is the Uranium?” the reported demanded.

The inspector shrugged again and gave the world the obvious answer, “I don’t know; ask the Iranians.”

The United Nations was not so quickly convinced. They spent the next six hours retrieving the other two containers. By the time the world press watched two more negative tests for Uranium they’d switched sides. It was now remembered how the Americans initially thought something fishy was going on; that is, until the president and the United Nations accepted Iran’s ipso facto explanation.

Now, with righteous indignation the shit really hit the fan.

The Security Council unanimously voted to condemn Iran and impose harsh sanctions, with one abstention — the United States Ambassador was too embarrassed to show up. They wanted to know where the Uranium was, and they wanted to know now. The Iranian delegation responded by walking out.

In the Indian Ocean it was the middle of the night.

Members of the Security Council, behind the scenes of course, rooted out and found the US ambassador. The question was asked: would the president consider storming the Galaxus or if necessary sinking it, because once the Uranium got to Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, it would in all likelihood disappear.

The ambassador replied soberly that the president was flying to Martha’s Vineyard to study the problem.