Sea fighter

by James H. Cobb

  The two Marines stood back, taking a second to catch up on their breathing. “Man,” Tallman commented, eyeing the rapidly spreading pool of oil. “I hope nobody smokes in bed around here.”

  “Yeah, the rain should help keep things damped down, though. And with the wind blowing offshore, nobody’s going to notice the fumes for a while. Let’s go.”

  They sloshed out to the containment berm, already wading through more petroleum than water. Once clear of the oil pool, Quillain reactivated his systems.

  “Tank two,” the first report came in from out of the darkness. “Diesel. Open.”

  “Tank four. Diesel. Open.”

  “Tank three. Gasoline. Open.”

  “Tank five. Dry hole.”

  “Tank six. Kerosene, maybe jet fuel. Open.”

  “Tank teams acknowledged. Tank one diesel and open. Tank teams proceed to extraction point. Establish extraction perimeter.”

  A volley of double clicks came back in reply. Quillain switched channels and accessed the seafighter command circuit. “Royalty, this is Mudskipper. Phase three completed. Operation successful. Standing by for extraction.”

  Amanda Garrett spoke no words of praise. Those could wait until the raider force was off the beach. “Acknowledged, Mudskipper. Initiating extraction. Boats are inbound.”

  “Roger.” Click! Stone bounced back to the raider force commo loop. “All elements. All elements. Extract! Extract! Extract! All elements acknowledge and fall back to extraction point. Move!”

  The extraction point was the tank farm’s handling pier where, during better days, the Shell Oil barges had unloaded their cargoes. The other sabotage teams were already there, crouching in a wary half-circle around the foot of the pier, weapons up and scanning the darkness. Quillain stood within the half-circle, counting in his men as the security teams jogged in from the night.

  “Sixteen … eighteen … twenty-two … twenty-four. Tallman, d’you confirm the count?”

  “Twenty-four out, twenty-four back. All hands accounted for, Captain. We good to go.”

  “Tool count on the cheater bars and bolt cutters?”

  “Six and six.”

  “Right. All hands! Double-check your gear! We don’t leave nothin’ behind. Nothin’!”

  There was movement out on the Sierra Leone estuary. Three patches of shadow defined themselves into a trio of sixteen-foot miniraider Zodiacs. Ghosting in on silenced outboards, they drew alongside the pilings of the loading pier, tucking in against the floating personnel stage.

  “Designated personnel for boat one, go!” Quillain called hoarsely. The billowing waves of raw petroleum fumes saturating the air were starting to rasp at his throat.

  Eight Marines peeled out of the security perimeter, moving with quiet haste onto the pier and down to the landing stage. Drilled repeatedly in the boarding procedure, each man knew the order in which he’d board and his place in the little craft. The loading took only seconds and then the miniraider pushed off, the Navy coxswain opening his throttle for the run out to the recovery vessel.

  “Boat one away, Captain.”

  “Personnel for boat two, go!”

  Quillain and Tallman were the last two men aboard the last boat, Quillain’s boots being the last to leave the dock.

  The seafighters lay a bare two hundred yards offshore, closed up and fully stealthed with their weapons pedestals and secondary armament retracted inboard. A filtered strobe light pulsed at the head of each snub mast, flashing the identification number of the hovercraft. Visible only to the night-vision visors of the Raider coxswains, it guided each small boat home to its mother ship.

  Tail ramps dropped and electric motors hummed, winching the raiders aboard, and the job was done.

  “Carondelet and Manassas report raiders recovered, Captain,” Steamer Lane advised jubilantly from the cockpit. “Threat boards are clear, and Operations reports no reaction ashore.”

  “We’re good down here as well, Steamer,” Amanda replied into the headset mike. “Close the tailgate and head us out. Maintain full stealth and swimmer mode until we clear the area.”

  The landing party dismounted from the raider craft, dripping with mud, oil, and water, and redolent with the good-natured giddiness of men who have just doffed the burden of tension and danger. Stone Quillain loomed over Amanda, the white flash of a broad grin breaking past the oil stains and camouflage paint smeared on his face. Amanda grinned back and held up her right hand, palm out. Quillain’s own more massive paw lifted, slapped hers in a high five that cracked like a rifle shot.

  “It went perfect!” the big Marine roared. “Totally, abso-goddamn-lutely perfect! Desperate Jesus! The first Special Forces operation in history to ever go down exactly as planned, and we can’t tell anybody about it!”

  “I guess we’ll just have to save the story for our memoirs, Stone. Well done! Extremely well done!”

  “Thank you kindly, Skipper. I’ll pass the word along to the boys.” Stone doffed his helmet and peeled off his MOLLE harness, stacking his gear against the central bay bulkhead in an oil-and-mud-sodden heap. “Lord, but a cup of coffee’s going to taste good.”

  Amanda moved back a hasty step to avoid getting splattered. I’ll have some sent back for you. For Pete’s sake, don’t go forward until you clean up a little. You’re dripping gunk all over the decks.”

  Quillain replied with a baleful glance. “Well, there you go! Never invite a woman to a poker game, a hunting camp, or a war. First thing you know, they start trying to tidy everything up.”

  Wellington Creek Petroleum Depot

  Kizzy, West African Union 0746 Hours, Zone Time;

  August 10, 2007

  The depot was a petroleum swamp, its tanks rising up out of a stinking, sticky morass of mud, spilled fuel, and standing water that sheened with a rainbow layer of oil contamination, all barely contained by the surrounding safety berms.

  Around the berm perimeters, salvage operations were already under way. A labor group drawn from among the women and older children of Freetown were hard at work, sopping up puddled diesel with bundles of rags, then wringing them out into open-topped oil drums. All electrical power to the tank farm had been cut and a cordon of militia sentries stood to around the complex, alert for anyone bearing a lit cigarette or any other open flame.

  “How much did we lose?” Belewa asked flatly.

  “All of the aviation fuel,” the moon-faced depot manager replied hesitantly. He was essentially a civilian administrator, and the ill-fitting militia uniform he had donned did little to give or inspire confidence. “Although there was little enough left of that. And perhaps seventy percent of the diesel and gasoline. The open valves weren’t discovered for a half hour or more, and it took time to call in the technical personnel to cap them off—”

  “I did not ask for excuses! I asked only for how much fuel was lost!”

  The manager’s words trailed off, fear catching him around the throat.

  Belewa looked away, disgusted. Not with the depot manager, but with himself. Terrifying this fat and hapless little man accomplished nothing.

  “I am certain you and your staff did all that was possible, Major Hawkins,” he said, keeping his voice controlled. “Now it is your job to save as much as you can. Every liter is precious.”

  “We will do our best, General. But much of it has already soaked into the ground. And for the rest, the water, the dirt, even after it has been double-strained … ” Again the director’s voice trailed off.

  “Every liter, Major,” Belewa said over his shoulder, striding back toward the tank farm gates.

  His chief of staff and a group of military police officers clustered near the guard shack. Beyond them, spotted in an open lot well back from the miasma of the oil spill, sat the BO105 helicopter that had carried Belewa and Atiba to th
e raid site. Its presence was an indicator of the disaster’s scale. Fuel rationing had long since mandated that the Union’s few air assets be used only in response to extreme emergency.

  “Brigadier,” Belewa snapped, not breaking stride as he passed the group, “do you have the security report?”

  “Yes, sir,” Atiba replied, looking up.

  “Good. Then we will go. There is nothing more we can accomplish here.”

  Noting the approach of his two VIP passengers, the helicopter pilot started the spool-up of the 105’s power plant. Within minutes they were airborne, flying south along the coast en route back to Monrovia.

  Belewa watched the beach slip past beneath them for a time before speaking into his intercom headset. “What did the security people have to say, Sako?” he inquired over the wind roar and turbine howl flooding in through the doorless side hatches.

  “It appears that this may have been an act of civil insurrection,” the Chief of Staff replied. “There is no evidence of a U.N. involvement.”

  “Pah!”

  “The gate sentries and the men in the guard shack report they were attacked by locals, by blacks,” Atiba insisted.

  “And there are a great many black men serving in the American Marine Corps.”

  “If it were the American Marines, why didn’t they blow up the entire depot? Or why not simply drop one of their missiles on it?”

  “Deniability, Sako! Deniability! This way, it can be said, just as you are saying, that this was an act of sabotage committed by our own people. Not only do they deprive us of our oil reserves, but it can be held up to the world as an example of how the Union is starting to collapse under the U.N. embargo. Of how our people are starting to turn against us.”

  “I cannot see it, General! Our ambassador at the United Nations indicates that the Security Council is maintaining a wait-and-see attitude concerning Guinea and the Union. They seem content to let the embargo take its course. There has been no discussion of a U.N. escalation that would involve aggressive acts against our territory. No sign at all. We would have received ample warning.”

  “This has nothing to do with the United Nations! The U.N. may be satisfied to maintain an embargo and to wait and see. She is not! She does not understand ‘wait and see.’ She is here to make war! On us!”

  “The American commander again? Then what do we do? File a protest?”

  “On what grounds? With what evidence? What kind of proof do we have?” Belewa brought his fists down on his knees in angry frustration. “And what would the Security Council do except to grin in our faces? With the Leopard fighting their battles for them, they are freed from having to make unpleasant decisions concerning us.”

  Belewa lifted his fists again, then caught himself. Instead, he used one hand to tiredly rub his eyes. “Remember this, my friend, for your own future battlefields. You may think and plan and prepare for a campaign and believe that you have prepared for every conceivable eventuality. But there will always be at least one random factor that you will overlook. I overlooked the Leopard, Sako. I did not consider the Leopard.”

  Mamba Point Hotel

  Monrovia, West African Union 2121 Hours, Zone Time;

  August 11, 2007

  The vista from his office balcony no longer gave General Belewa the pleasure it once had. The wind from the sea was as cooling and mellow as ever, but the sea itself had become an ally of his foes. And the night itself was too dark.

  The generators ran only here at his headquarters and at the Monrovia fleet base and army garrison, three lonely constellations in the night. The rest of the capital underwent a rationing mandated blackout. No streetlights burned. No vehicles moved in those streets. No buildings were illuminated save by the faint flicker of candlelight or the ruddy glow of charcoal. Even kerosene and lamp oil were precious and hard to come by now.

  The people, his people, huddled in the darkness again. It was as if he had never come to this place. As if he had never tried to make a difference.

  “General … Obe. May we speak with you?”

  “Of course, Sako.”

  Brigadier Atiba and Ambassador Umamgi waited within, standing beside Belewa’s desk. His chief of staff smiled, an eagerness and a fire flaring within his old comrade that Belewa had not seen for many days.

  The Algerian mullah was smiling as well, but for him it seemed only an enhancement of the growing sardonicism he had been displaying these past weeks. Two stapled and type written pages in the format of an operations proposal lay on the desk blotter.

  “General, I think we may have a plan.”

  “What kind of plan, Sako?”

  “A plan to break the blockade. A way to get us the fuel we need. A way to beat the Leopard, Obe!”

  Belewa dropped into his chair. Picking up the proposal, his eyes sought the first paragraph. “Is this a concept of yours, Sako?”

  “No, but it looks good to me. The premise was suggested by the Algerians. Ambassador Umamgi promises his government’s full support in the operation. It is all so simple, Obe. It has to work!”

  Belewa scanned the first page, then the second. It was indeed simple. All so very, very simple.

  “No.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence. The excitement drained from Atiba’s face, bewilderment and anger boiling up in replacement.

  “No? What do you mean, no? This will work, Obe! This plan strikes right at the heart of your Leopard. Haven’t you always taught us to strike at your enemy’s weaknesses? Well, this plan strikes at the weakness of the Garrett woman. It will destroy her and the stranglehold she has on us!”

  “It also takes us back to places we have left behind, Sako.” Belewa threw the proposal back onto the desktop. “It drives us to do things we have sworn never to do again. We will think of something else.”

  “Now I say no!” Atiba leaned forward, slamming his palms down onto the desktop, glaring into Belewa’s face. “Obe, we are running out of time! We lost half of our oil reserves last night. Half! We have less than six weeks left ! Then everything you and I have worked for is over!”

  “We will find some other way to break the blockade! One that leaves our honor intact.”

  “Honor be damned! What other way? We are throwing away a chance to win! I want a reason for this, Obe, not talk of honor and places we’ve been. I want one solid reason why we should not at least try!”

  “You desire a solid reason? I will give you one.” Belewa rose from behind the desk, his eyes locking with Atiba’s. “We will not execute this plan because I say we will not! Is that adequate, Brigadier?”

  The impact of Belewa’s words pushed the Chief of Staff back from the desk. For a long heartbeat the two warriors stood posed, rank and past friendship an irrelevancy. Then Atiba turned and stormed from the room.

  The General and the Ambassador were alone then, and it was Umamgi who broke the silence. “There is a parable,” the Algerian said quietly, “of a man who was a great king. However, this man valued his own pride more than he did his kingdom. And because of his pride, one day the king lost his kingdom. And since there was no kingdom, there was no reason for there to be a king. And since there was no longer a reason for a king, inshalla, there was no longer a reason for there to be a man. A thought, General.”

  Belewa felt his hand come to rest on the flap of his pistol holster.

  “Get out!”

  The mullah only smiled, nodded, and turned for the door. As it closed behind him, Belewa sank down behind his desk once more, his head coming to rest on his crossed arms.

  1¼ Miles Southwest of

  Point Yannoi, Côte d’Ivoire 2210 Hours, Zone time;

  August 16, 2007

  Deftly, Felix Akwaba brought his pirogue into the wind, heaving to in the easy ocean swell. Rising stiffly from the aft thwart, he lowered the patc
hed cotton sail, letting his little craft drift. Settling back again, he held the bow into the waves with an occasional dip of the steering paddle.

  The night was lit only by a half moon and the ten million and one tropic stars overhead. It mattered little to Felix, however. He’d been sailing this stretch of coast for fifty-odd years, and he knew it better than he did the inside of his own hut.

  If he should glance back over his right shoulder, he would see the phosphorescent flash of the surf rolling over Biahuin Reef. If he should look over the left, it would be the flashing red warning beacon of the radio mast at Point Yannoi, a marker as good as any official lighthouse on the coast.

  This was the usual place and the correct time. They would make their appearance soon.

  When it happened, as always, it was a little startling, the only warning being the hiss of a razor-sharp bow cutting water. That bow loomed abruptly out of the darkness, towering over the pirogue and sweeping past as the vessel came alongside. A sweep of foredeck followed, a slender gun barrel up-angled against the sky and a rakish superstructure, the faint glowworm glow of the binnacle light in the wheelhouse the only illumination visible along the Patrol Craft’s 170-foot length.

  Felix heard the muffled engines now, reversing, and a moment later the wooden hull of his pirogue and the steel one of the newcomer bumped lightly together. Boathooks reached down, holding his craft alongside, and a dark shape extended a hand to help pull him aboard.

  His helmeted and flak-jacketed guide led him silently inboard. Again as usual, the interior of the little warship was illuminated with that odd bloodred light that did not hurt Felix’s night-adjusted eyes. Within the cramped wardroom, she was waiting.

  ”Comment allez-vous, Monsieur Akwaba. Le petit biere?”

  When she had first sought him out, her French had the stiffness and formality of the European about it. Now, however, after only a few short months, she had the lilting flow of the African idiom down perfectly. Almost unnervingly so. Because of her near-white hair and gray-blue eyes, the agents she recruited among the Frenchside boatmen privately referred to her as Le Petite Phantome,” The Little Ghost.”