by Don Mann
“Understood. We’ll get that for you. But you haven’t answered the important question.”
Grissom: “Yeah, Crocker, how the hell are you going to get on the ship?”
“The only way we can in this situation.”
“What’s that?”
“From cigarette boats dropped in the water.”
“You’re kidding, right?” asked Grissom.
“No. We’ve done it before.”
“Where?” Grissom asked, hands on his hips, chest jutting out aggressively. “And where the hell are we going to find cigarette boats?”
Crocker turned to Anders and asked, “Any aircraft carriers in the vicinity with SEAL rescue teams attached?”
“I’ll find out.”
“I’m going to need six more SEALs. Guys who are experienced jumpers and swimmers, and have practiced underways.”
“Underways?” Anders asked.
“That’s what we call them. You’d better write all this down.”
Anders did, quickly. “Go ahead. What else?”
“We’re gonna need at least three cigarette boats on wooden pallets equipped with Vetus HD silencers. Three experienced steer-and-throttle men. Three telescopic poles equipped with cave-in ladders. And two planes—one to drop the boats and another that we can parachute from into the water.”
“Seas might be extremely rough.”
“We should expect to lose some men, but we’ll manage,” continued Crocker. “We’ll also need to get to the carrier or base that we’re going to deploy from. Once at the exfil point, I’ll need to huddle with the other six SEALs. All of us are going to need the complete package of weapons and gear—NVGs, comms, explosives, tear-gas grenades, percussion grenades, smoke grenades, et cetera, all waterproofed or in waterproof weapons bags.”
“Check.”
Grissom’s demeanor brightened. He said, “I’ll call the Station and have them put us in direct contact with Special Operations Command in Tampa.”
“Good,” answered Anders. “Focus first on the carrier with the appropriate resources—SEALs, cigarette boats, pallets, jump platforms.”
“Will do.”
As Grissom strode outside with his cell phone, Janice hurried back with news that HQ had already located an engineer who had worked on the design of the Disney Magic and knew the vessel inside and out.
“Excellent,” Anders said. “When can he talk?”
“He’s standing by now, ready to Skype.”
Anders looked at Crocker. “Chief Warrant, you’re driving this mission. What do you want to do first?”
Crocker considered quickly, then answered, “Ask Oz for a private room with a computer, then summon the rest of my men. I want them to hear this.”
“Okay. Will do.”
Scott Russert looked at the glowing green LED number on the nightstand, which read 9:53 p.m. He and his family had watched the movies Aladdin, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty, played four games of Parcheesi, eaten most of the fruit, candy, and animal crackers, and consumed all the bottled water. They were exhausted and ravenous as a result of the relentless anxiety.
They had heard nothing further—no messages or announcements—since the warning from Captain Hutley that morning. Neither Scott’s nor Karen’s cell phone could pick up a signal, and the TV transmitter on the flat-screen wasn’t working.
The stateroom where they had laughed, played, planned activities, and sung silly songs together had become a prison cell. All he could tell from looking out the portholes, which were located about five feet above water level on the port side, was that the ship had turned around and was moving rapidly.
Karen lay on the bed suffering from heart palpitations and their sons were antsy and hungry. When he tried calling room service on the blue courtesy phone by the bed, no one answered.
“I’m hungry, Daddy,” Randy said. He was the more inquisitive and vocal of their two sons. “Can we try to see if Lumiere’s is open?”
“It isn’t, son.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the captain said all the dining rooms are closed.”
“But how can we know for sure, if we don’t try?”
“You have to trust me, son. The captain made an announcement.”
“Did he say when the dining rooms will open?”
“No.”
“Are we just going to sit here and starve?”
“Of course not. Don’t talk like that. I’ll set up the Wii for you and your brother.”
“What about the pizzeria? It’s not a dining room. We can have pizza, right Russell?”
Russell chimed in, “Yeah, let’s get pizza and Cokes!”
“The pizzeria is closed, too,” Scott answered.
“How do you know?”
“Listen, boys. The captain told us to stay in our rooms. We have to do as he says.”
Randy thought for a minute and said, “I want to get off this ship.”
“We’ll do that, son, as soon as we can.”
Scott flicked on the flat-screen again, activated Wii tennis, and handed the wands to the boys, who were soon slapping the virtual ball back and forth. Then he sat beside Karen, who looked hot and uncomfortable.
He wanted to help his family get through this and back to their lives in Putney. He wasn’t a churchgoing man, but found himself praying. Reciting a Hail Mary in his head, he retreated to the bathroom to get a wet towel for Karen. When he shut off the water, he heard muffled voices in the hallway.
Dear God! What now?
A door shut and a few seconds later he heard a knocking sound and more voices. They were moving closer.
This could go very badly.
Looking at himself in the mirror, he whispered, “Scott, you can do this. Think of your family. Stay calm.”
Three knocks sounded on their metal door, sending a jolt of panic down his spine. He waved the boys farther into the room, took three deep breaths, and answered.
Standing on the other side of the door were two crew members in white tunics beside two metal carts piled high with sandwiches and bottles of water. One of them had a large bruise on his face and swollen skin around his right eye. The other had spots of blood on his tunic and a cut across his lip. Standing behind them were two bearded men wearing black masks and holding automatic weapons.
The ferocity in their eyes unnerved him to the point that he wanted to scream or run. He fought to keep it together.
“Sir, sorry for the inconvenience,” said the porter with the swollen eye. “We have a limited number of cheese sandwiches and bottles of water. How many are there in your cabin?”
“F-f-four,” Scott stammered, holding onto the doorframe for support.
One of the porters handed him four sandwiches wrapped in plastic. The other placed four 16-ounce bottles of Evian on the floor just inside the room.
They had moved fast and were ready to leave.
Scott’s legs shook as he blurted out, “My wife isn’t feeling well. She suffers from high blood pressure.”
The porter with the swollen eye said, “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Does she have her medicine with her?”
“Uh, well…no. She ran out.”
One of the armed men leaned forward and grunted something into the ear of the steward, something Scott couldn’t make out.
The steward said, “Tell your wife to drink lots of water and try to rest. We’ll see what we can do.”
He swallowed the last word: “Okay.”
Janice, bleary-eyed, sat before a computer next to Colonel Oz, looking through passport and customs surveillance photos of passengers that had been collected by Interpol from immigration services in Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece, and Turkey. To Janice it seemed like a useless exercise. She had petitioned to go with Anders, Davis, Akil, Mancini, and Crocker when they left forty minutes earlier to fly to the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, currently positioned southwest of the island of Cyprus. It only added to her discomfort
that Oz puffed on one Camel cigarette after another and occasionally glanced down the front of her blouse. With each cigarette he lit, he apologized and said, “For my nerves. I’m sorry.”
As much as she wanted to dislike him, she couldn’t. He was stressed out, too. None of them had ever faced a crisis of this magnitude.
Smoking, fidgeting, then biting his lip, he announced, “That’s all of them. That’s all the pictures.”
She nodded.
Interpol had told them it wasn’t a complete set.
Oz dropped the butt to the floor and lit up another. “We take a few minutes, then try again?”
“Okay.”
She stood, stretched her back, and used her cell to check her encrypted e-mail account. Having entered the passwords, she waited for the special program to translate the e-mails into readable English. Her mailbox was almost full, with a hundred new messages sent in the ten minutes since the last time she had checked. She quickly scrolled through subject lines like “Ship course and location,” “Estimated fuel consumption,” “Estimated number of terrorists required,” and “Ports of call and number of passengers onboarding at each.”
Janice opened and scanned through a handful. More conjecture about the identity of the Fox and several possible candidates. Consensus seemed to be building around Mohammad Farhad al-Kazaz, the ISIS leader Crocker had met in Syria. He fit all the primary criteria—a known and active ISIS jihadist, considered highly intelligent, with a fervent following and global ambitions.
Colonel Oz had his elbows propped on the desk and his head buried in his hands. “Anything I should know?”
“Just more ideas about the identity of the Fox.”
He looked as if he was about to cry. “It’s got to be al-Kazaz.”
“Why?”
“Because…” His voice trailed off.
She quickly ran through everything she knew about the ISIS leader—born in Syria, fought alongside bin Laden in Tora Bora, around forty years old, had built a base of followers in southwestern Iraq, had become a major player in northern Syria.
“You know what he looks like?” she asked, pocketing her phone and returning to the chair beside Oz.
“Of course.”
“Then let’s look through the photos again.”
He nodded and chicken-pecked the keys to set the sequence in motion.
She had already decided that if the crisis ended in tragedy, she would resign from the Agency and use the hardship money she had saved to start an organic farm in eastern Virginia. Settle down, maybe marry and adopt two needy children.
The photos flew by. The faces all started to look the same. Noses, eyes, mouths, all randomly placed, overlapping one another. She was reminded of some strange iteration of Mr. Potato Head, a toy she had loved as a child.
The sequence arrived at a set of stills taken from a surveillance camera above the customs desk in Kuşadası. In it appeared a tall, fit, good-looking man in a black suit with an attractive woman. She thought the man resembled a model she had seen in a magazine ad for men’s suits. The woman also seemed familiar. The sequence moved automatically to the next set.
“Wait,” Janice said. “Go back.”
She studied the woman’s face and tried to place her.
“Can you zoom in closer?”
He did. There was something distinctive about her, the curl of her top lip, the narrowing of her nose at the tip. She tried to imagine her with her hair pulled up. And then it hit her.
“She’s Mr. Talab’s assistant! I met her with him four days ago at the Sultanhan Hotel in Istanbul.”
“This woman?” Oz asked, pointing a thick finger at the screen. “You know this woman? Are you sure about that?”
She looked again. She was certain. “Yes.”
“Do you know her last name or relationship to Mr. Talab?”
“She was introduced to us as Mr. Talab’s assistant. I believe he called her Fatima. I don’t remember her last name.”
“She’s on the ship?”
“Apparently.”
“If it’s really her, this might be something.”
Mentally, she started to assemble the pieces. Mr. Talab had led them to the sarin and to Hassan, both of whom went missing. His assistant had boarded the ship in Turkey hours before it was hijacked.
It had to be more than a series of coincidences. This seemed like evidence that pointed to people and motives behind the attack. The first person she wanted to tell was Anders, who had been at the meeting in Istanbul. Maybe he would remember Fatima’s last name and her connection to Talab.
Anders answered from the command center of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the Mediterranean between the coasts of Cyprus and Turkey. The ship was a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class carrier first launched in 1975, and had since played an important role in numerous military deployments in the Middle East, including the 1990 Gulf War. She was a massive 1,115 feet long, armed with sophisticated radars and electronic jamming systems, Seasparrow antiaircraft and antimissile missiles, RIM-116 Rolling Airframe missiles, and ninety fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.
“Janice, we’re extremely pressed for time here,” Anders answered. “What do you have to report?” He was sitting at a conference room table between Crocker and the ship’s electronic warfare officer, who had just reported that the AN/SLQ-32 (V)4 electronic warfare system had successfully deployed focused radio waves and laser light to disable the Disney Magic’s electronics. It was also collecting incoming and outgoing radio signals and carefully tracking the ship’s movement, speed, and fuel consumption.
Janice informed him that Mr. Talab’s assistant, Fatima, had boarded the ship at Kuşadası, Turkey, only hours before it was hijacked.
“Who?”
“Mr. Talab’s assistant, the woman he brought with him to the meeting at the Sultanhan Hotel.”
“Interesting,” Anders said, not sure what to make of the information or how it related to the rescue mission that he and the others in the room were a hundred percent focused on. “Report this to Grissom in Ankara. Tell him I suggested that he track down Talab. Let’s find out exactly what this means before we jump to any conclusions.”
“Okay.”
“What about Hassan? Has he been located? Any evidence that he’s on the Magic, too?”
“As far as I know, he’s still unaccounted for. We continue to pore through customs records and passenger lists. At this point our information is incomplete, but Interpol is updating it constantly.”
“Good.”
The lights in the conference room dimmed and grainy real-time aerial footage of the Disney Magic shot from a high-altitude surveillance drone appeared on a screen.
“I’ve got to go, Janice. But excellent work. Call Grissom. Keep up your pursuit. It’s an interesting lead, no question.”
“I will, sir.”
“Thanks.”
The circular room was crowded with Mighty Ike officers who were coming and going, whispering in Admiral Marcelus’s ear and leaving reports. The captain sat at the middle of the table in a high-backed executive chair, rubbing his chin and studying the various data—including wind speed and direction measured at various altitudes, the course and speed of the Disney Magic, radar readings, and incoming weather patterns—projected on various screens on the walls.
It was a whole lot for Crocker to digest.
One of the Eisenhower’s executive officers reported that they had located two cigarette boats in the ship’s hold that were currently being loaded onto wooden pallets. Six additional SEALs from Team Ten had been flown in from a base in Crete where they had been practicing amphibious landings with members of British SBS and the Greek First Raider Paratrooper Brigade.
Neither of the cigarette boats was equipped with a Vetus HD silencer. The bigger problem was the turbulent wind conditions. Current readings near the Magic showed gusts of up to forty knots (forty-six miles an hour) at three thousand feet, which made any kind of canopy parachute jump impossible.
Enhanced satellite weather prediction data indicated the windy and stormy conditions would abate beginning at around 0700—the same time as the terrorists’ deadline.
At 0002 hours, time was running out.
In spite of the extremely dangerous conditions, Crocker called Captain Sutter in Virginia Beach to request permission to launch.
Sutter said, “I admire your courage, Crocker, but I can’t make that decision.”
“Who can?”
“Admiral Evan Thompson of U.S. Special Operations Command in conjunction with the president.”
“Put me in touch with him,” demanded Crocker.
“I just got off the phone with the admiral, and his answer was a big no. Given current conditions, he doubts that the cigarette boats will ever make it to the ship. His engineers tell him they’ll break up as soon as they hit the water.”
“Then we’ll deploy directly from the Eisenhower.”
“The cig boats will never make it.”
“It’s worth a try,” Crocker argued. “We’re looking at the real possibility of three or four thousand casualties.”
“We all realize that,” Sutter answered.
“Then what’s the alternative?”
“The Turkish president has initiated secret discussions with the terrorists in hopes of talking them down to some kind of reasonable settlement.”
“How’s that going?”
“Badly.”
“That means you’ve got to let us deploy.”
“I can’t. The president will never allow it. And Admiral Marcelus won’t let you leave his ship.”
Crocker hung up, seething with so much frustration he couldn’t stand still. He got up, paced behind the table, then told Anders he was heading to the men’s room to splash water on his face.
He needed something—a ray of hope, a possibility. In the narrow passageways lined with photos of the ship’s officers, he saw Mancini standing with one of the ship operations men, a tall red-bearded fellow in a khaki uniform. They were going over a list of equipment on a clipboard. Weapons, NVGs, comms.
Mancini saw the intensity in Crocker’s eyes and asked, “What’s wrong? You look like you’re about to explode.”