FORTY-SIX
THE MOTHERSHIP WAS two hundred miles off the coast of Oman, chugging east at six knots. It was on a reciprocal course for the fishing boat and had deployed its drone countless times over the past seven hours to investigate every westbound radar contact within a ten-mile radius. The drone operators were routinely swapping out battery packs and even had a spare aircraft ready to launch in case of an equipment failure or if the need arose to investigate two targets simultaneously.
The plan was to intercept the Iranian vessel before it entered the Gulf of Aden, where the coasts of Africa and Asia compressed the shipping traffic heading toward the Suez Canal into a narrow space. While the Gulf had been the traditional haunt of the Somali pirates, who preyed on targets of opportunity, the increased density of ships would work against Yaxaas’s team, who valued secrecy above all else.
They wanted to intercept the Saviz while it was off on its own.
Separated from the pack.
Lagging the herd.
* * *
—
IT WAS JUST past 17:00 hours when the drone operator radioed the bridge.
“Positive contact, bearing 343 degrees, range eight point seven miles.”
Nacay glanced at a live video feed from the drone, which was being broadcast on a twenty-four-inch video monitor on the mothership’s bridge. The ship’s profile and coloring matched the photos he’d been given.
“Show me the stern,” he said.
The drone pilot flew a thousand meters behind the fishing vessel and used a high-magnification daylight camera to zoom in on the ship’s name.
Saviz.
Written in English and Farsi.
They had their target.
But the Saviz was ahead of schedule, and the pirates operated only at night. They would have to bide their time until the attack window opened—sunset would occur that evening at 17:32 hours and twilight would persist for seventy-five minutes after that. It gave the pirates a five-hour window to hit the ship, establish control, turn for the open ocean, and send it to the bottom before the moon rose half an hour past midnight.
They could do that in their sleep.
Nacay entered the variables into a spreadsheet on his laptop and came up with the plan. They’d let the Saviz pass by in the opposite direction until the mothership was out of radar range, then turn 180 degrees and lay on the speed, appearing to the Saviz to be a new contact approaching from astern.
The mothership would then pass far enough in front of the Saviz to drop off her radar again before launching the semisubmersibles once night had fallen. The two speedboats would lie in wait on either side of their target’s projected course—just like a World War II submarine wolfpack.
* * *
—
THE DRONE WAS running nonstop, alternating between low light and thermal modes as it orbited the target ship, gathering intelligence and informing the assault.
The ship was roughly 120 feet long, with a sharply raked bow and a two-story deckhouse in the stern. The waters off Oman were popular fishing grounds for sailfish, tuna, and dorado, and the Saviz was running longlines from her outriggers to keep up appearances.
Nacay updated on his laptop the positions and speeds for the target and the other vessels. They were close, there were more ships around than they would have liked, and it was going to be fast.
“Air-1, launch on my mark . . . Boat-1, launch one-one seconds from my mark . . . Boat-2, launch one-five seconds from my mark . . . 3-2-1, MARK.”
It was 19:42:03 hours when the helo lifted from the deck. They were two miles behind the Saviz, which was one mile behind the picket line formed by the two semisubmersibles.
The helicopter approached at wavetop level until the semisubmersibles had emptied their ballast tanks. The pilot activated the electronic-warfare pod, and the fishing boat’s radios, GPS, and satellite communications immediately turned to static. If the Iranians had put a military crew aboard, they’d know they were being jammed.
The semisubmersibles were alongside the Saviz thirty seconds later. The Norwegian on Boat-1 and the Italian on Boat-2 used bolt cutters to sever the longlines while the rest of the team threw grappling hooks and web ladders over the rails.
The gunfire started a minute later.
While the assault team had expected the smaller fishing boat to be an easier target than a thousand-foot tanker, the Saviz’s small size also made the approach of the two semisubmersibles impossible to conceal, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard sailors fired down from the deckhouse at the men climbing over her sides, barely forty feet away. Two pirates received light wounds before the team was able to move to cover and return fire. They raked the bridge with automatic weapons fire, shattering glass and sending bullets through its thin metal skin.
The Norwegian took four men and advanced to the deckhouse. The door was locked, and he called the breacher forward. They hadn’t brought the fancy explosives for the small fishing boat, and the muscular man took a full swing at the lock with a sledgehammer. It broke halfway, with the bolt still holding the door closed, and he wound up for a second try just as a burst of gunfire came through the door. Two of the rounds were stopped by his Dyneema vest and its bulletproof ceramic, but the third round caught him in his left eye and he fell to the deck, dead.
Standing off to the side, the Norwegian picked up the sledgehammer and finished the job as the Iranian gunman continued to fire. The door crashed open, and the Kenyan tossed a grenade inside, primed to explode almost instantaneously.
The blast killed the Iranian defender, and the three pirates stormed in. It was a small room, no more than an entryway and, except for the smoke in the air, the blood on the walls, and the body on the ground, it was empty. There were two doors on either side of a stairway that led up and down.
The Norwegian tried the first door.
It was unlocked.
The three pirates stacked up outside. The third man opened the door while the first two stepped inside. The room was tiny, a small cabin with a single berth and a grimy porthole. It smelled like mildew and it was empty.
The pirates checked the second door. It too was unlocked, but when they opened it they found a crewman inside, hiding under a table.
Two pirates fired at once and the room was cleared.
Outside, the helicopter had closed with the ship and the snipers were firing at the bridge with their semiautomatic sniper rifles, blowing out the windows so their thermal sights could acquire targets. The heavy rifle rounds killed one of the ship’s officers and drove the others from the glassed-in bridge.
“At least two crew squirting from the bridge,” said one of the snipers over the assault frequency.
The Norwegian motioned to his team.
They ascended the first few stairs, with weapons pointed up the staircase, but he raised a closed fist in the air when he heard footsteps racing toward them.
The two remaining Iranian naval officers raced down the stairway—straight into the pirates’ sights, barely three feet away.
The noise was deafening as each pirate fired twice, sending half a dozen rounds flying through the cramped space in the span of a second.
The Norwegian stepped over the dead Iranians and keyed his radio.
“Air-1, Boat-1, squirters down, friendlies approaching the bridge.”
The heliborne sniper fire ceased immediately and the Norwegian radioed Nacay that the assault team had taken command of the bridge.
Back on deck, the former Polish commando led the rest of Team-2 down a set of steel-grate steps into the hold. A commercial fishing boat of this size would have at least six more crew.
The accommodations level was one level down. It looked like a budget motel, with linoleum floor tiles and crude carpentry. There were four doors, two on each side. All were closed. The Pole signaled for the team to split up,
with two men holding the hall, while two teams of shooters stacked up outside the first two doors. All the gunfire had eliminated any element of surprise and the assaulters immediately kicked open the doors. Both rooms were empty, but an Iranian crewman stepped into the hall from another room and opened fire with an AK-47.
A member of his country’s elite Sepah Navy Special Force, the IRGC marine had known it would be a suicide mission before he fired the first shot, but he’d heard his countrymen killed like animals and decided that going down quietly was not his destiny. He tucked the weapon into his shoulder and held down the trigger, spraying rounds throughout the cramped hallway. Three pirates were hit. The first was protected by his body armor, the second caught a round in the shoulder, and the third had his femoral artery obliterated when a bullet caught him in the thigh.
The Iranian absorbed nine rounds in the chest and four in the head before he fell to the deck.
A collage of blood and spent shell casings littered the hallway.
The Pole cleared the remaining rooms with two of his men, swiftly dispatching two more unarmed crew members while the other assaulters tended to their wounded colleagues.
The shoulder injury was non-life-threatening, but the Italian who’d suffered the leg wound was laid flat on the ground while a teammate cut away the tiger stripe camouflage pants he was wearing. Another teammate applied two tourniquets and cranked them tight before locking them off, but the location of the wound high up on the thigh prevented the lifesaving devices from stopping the blood flow. The Italian’s breathing grew shallow and desperate, and five minutes later, his eyes blinked for the last time.
The Pole returned to the main deck and radioed Nacay that the target was secure. The jamming stopped and the helicopter returned to the mothership just as the deck crane finished hauling aboard the second semisubmersible. Two and a half minutes later the helo landed amidships on the unmarked helipad and shut down its engine. The ground crew began folding its rotors the instant they stopped turning.
Thirty-one minutes after the first semisubmersible returned to the mothership, all of the equipment and weapons were secured in their containers. The ship could withstand a physical inspection from a naval boarding team.
Aboard the Saviz, the Pole took two men below. The hold was dark and cold and smelled of rotten fish. The men had quickly searched it earlier, but now they were opening the massive freezer cases.
They hit pay dirt with the second case. Inside were dozens of olive-drab wooden crates. The pirates hauled the nearest one out by its rope handles and popped the metal latches.
Packed inside were a dozen Iranian-made AK-47s. Other crates held machine guns, RPGs, and nearly a hundred 107mm rockets for a Chinese multiple launch rocket system. The Pole radioed Nacay about what he’d found.
“Photograph everything, then set the charges,” replied Nacay. “We’ll be alongside in ten minutes.”
FORTY-SEVEN
A RED BAJAJ SLAMMED on its brakes and pulled to the side of the road. The three-wheeled taxi had a cracked windshield, a greasy fringe dangling from the ceiling, and a driver who was missing several teeth.
Pickens got in.
“Olympic Hotel,” he said in Somali.
“The Nasa-Hablod is better,” said the driver.
“What about the Sahafi?”
The recognition sequence complete, the driver nodded and pulled away from the curb. It had been four days since the attack on the Saviz, and the pirate mothership had returned to Somalia the prior morning.
The Bajaj wound its way down the main road and passed through the K5 intersection, where al-Shabaab militants had detonated an enormous truck bomb a few months earlier. More than two hundred people had died and hundreds more were wounded. The area still bore deep scars from the attack, and Pickens was staring at the wreckage when the driver passed him a manila envelope. The CIA officer stepped out of the cab at the next intersection and waited with the envelope in his hand.
He scratched his right ear.
Clap pulled to the side of the road. He and Jake had been following the taxi at a distance, running protective surveillance for the meeting. Pickens climbed into the back seat and Jake glanced at the envelope.
“You look at it yet?”
Pickens shook his head and tore the top off. Inside were two dozen photographs from the Saviz. There were several shots of open crates filled with grenade launchers, rockets, and more rifles and machine guns than they could count. More pictures showed the interior and exterior layout of the ship, including the name painted on the stern, and finally, there was a series of overhead thermal images showing the ship listing to one side and ultimately sinking beneath the waves.
“Graves certainly is unorthodox,” Pickens said, “but maybe that’s his genius.”
Clap glanced at Jake. Unlike Pickens, he also worked for Ted Graves.
And “genius” wasn’t the word either of them would have chosen.
Pickens passed the photos to Jake in the front seat. There were several dozen wooden crates in the massive refrigerator cases, which would have held the fishing boat’s catch until it returned to land. Yaxaas’s men had opened a few of them, and Jake counted the Kalashnikov rifles (twelve to a crate) and Iranian-made RPG-7 rocket launchers (eight to a crate), plus hundreds of warheads and several PKM machine guns. Jake finally reached the pictures of the ship going down.
He was going through the photos a second time when something caught his attention.
One of the machine gun crates was painted the same drab green as the others, and it had the same rope handles and metal latches, but it had glistened when the camera’s flash hit it, as if it were wet.
Jake checked the other photos to see if the crate had been opened. It hadn’t, but it had been captured in another picture from another angle, and Jake saw the same phenomenon—moisture on its surface while similar crates around it were dry.
He put the photo back in the stack and looked out the window.
It was probably nothing.
FORTY-EIGHT
THE WHOLE TEAM was in the safe house living room when Jake called Ted Graves.
“I’ll call you back in five,” Graves said. He was breathing heavily. Well into his forties, the Special Activities chief often exercised for two hours a day, in addition to spending fourteen hours in the office, and Jake had caught him on the treadmill.
Jake killed the connection and paced around the room. Taped on the wall next to Clap’s gear was a picture of a woman in running clothes crossing a finish line somewhere.
“Who’s that?” Jake said.
“Wife,” said Clap.
“Attractive.”
“Yeah.”
“What was she running?”
“Potomac River Marathon.”
“Amazing.”
“That she could run twenty-six miles?”
“Nah. That her Seeing Eye dog could.”
Clap punched Jake in the shoulder.
Graves called back a few minutes later. Even though he was speaking on a secure encrypted phone, and everyone in the Agency gym had at least a top secret security clearance—including the guy handing out the towels—Graves still had to be discreet.
“What’s the latest?” he asked.
“The Saviz is in the Arabian Basin, under ten thousand feet of water.”
“You have confirmation?”
“Pickens picked up the photographs today.”
“What about the cargo?”
“The crates were all labeled and Yaxaas’s men did spot checks. It was small arms: rifles, machine guns, and grenade launchers—plus some unguided rockets.”
“Perfect. The source who tipped us off just earned himself a ten-thousand-dollar bonus.”
“Ted . . . Was there anything else on that ship we should be looking for?” said Jake.
“
Like what?”
“I’m not sure, just a hunch. There’s nothing we should be worried about?”
“Well, if there was something else, you don’t need to worry about it, because as you just pointed out, it’s all under ten thousand feet of water.”
FORTY-NINE
STEVE, THE ARMY Special Forces major, arrived at the safe house and spread several surveillance photos across the kitchen table. He was giving Pickens context on the images and hoping the veteran CIA officer could help him identify some of the men.
“I’ve seen this guy before,” Pickens said. “He’s a weapons smuggler based somewhere outside Mogadishu, but I don’t know his name.”
“Any issues with us rolling him up and asking him some questions?” Steve asked.
“Have at it,” Pickens said. “Somalia has enough arms dealers.”
Jake and Clap joined the conversation and the four men chatted for a few minutes about the challenges faced by the various parties who were trying to stop the civil war. So many people were getting rich from the bloodshed that there was little desire from the entrenched interests in seeing peace take hold.
“The problem,” said Steve, “is that the border is just too damn porous to stop the flow of weapons. Just yesterday, we intercepted a shipment of small arms coming out of the Port of Kismaayo.”
The CIA men didn’t react visibly, because Steve wasn’t read-in on their operation, but they all had the same thought.
“What were they moving?” Clap asked.
“Iranian AKs and RPGs—garden variety stuff.”
“Anything else?” Jake asked. “Anything unusual?”
Steve hadn’t mentioned the rockets or the machine guns, and the crate with the condensation was still on Jake’s mind.
“No,” said Steve, “but there was other vehicle traffic that night, so I suppose they could have snuck something out before we established cordon.”
Black Flag Page 17