Arabian Collusion

by James Lawrence

  Migos and I were in dry suits and closed-circuit dive gear. I had a heavy pack of equipment strapped to my back. On my chest, I was wearing a SIEL rebreather unit with a 240-minute soda lime canister. We bobbed in the gentle sea waiting for McDonald to hand us the Suex Scooters off the hydraulic ramp. Once we had the scooters in hand, we descended to ten feet. Through my mask, I could see the compass and depth gauge illuminated on top of the scooter. My rifle dangled below me on a sling.

  I looked around for Migos; it was pitch black, but I felt his scooter bump up against my ribs. The crescent moon provided no visibility at our depth. Migos tapped me on the arm and I eased my scooter to full throttle. He would follow the small green LED light attached to the bottom of my backpack.

  We slid through the water at three knots. The speed pressed my mask tight up against my face and made it impossible to turn my head lest the water rip it off. Unable to see anything, I concentrated on the navigation board built into the scooter and maintained a bearing of one hundred and sixty-five degrees. As we drew closer to the shore, I could hear through the water the pounding of the surf and feel the push and pull from the force of the waves overhead. I backed off on the scooter throttle when I could no longer maintain a depth of ten feet without hitting the sea floor. Before long, the surf was breaking right over our heads. I let the scooter work through the foam until the water was knee-high and we had to stand.

  I removed my fins and struggled with my heavy equipment load through the surf and up to the rocky shore. When we reached the base of the cliff, I checked our location on the GPS. Then we stashed our diving gear and removed our dry suits. From inside the waterproof backpacks we retrieved our climbing gear and a set of small assault packs. Migos had the heaviest pack. He was carrying the explosives, rockets, grenades, my body armor vest and helmet. If Turki managed to escape to his panic room, we were going to have to blast him out and Migos had the kit to do it.

  I wore a lightweight plastic bump helmet with a pair of mounted ANPVS-31 night vision goggles. It’s hard to climb with goggles because of how they distort depth perception. I locked them in the stow position, as I wasn’t going to need them to find a line up the ninety-five-foot cliff in this light. I clipped the end of the one-hundred-fifty-foot rope to the climbing harness around my waist and began the ascent.

  The sandstone cliff was perfectly vertical. On the rock climber’s scale, it was going to be a 5.9 most of the way, with pretty easy hand and foot holds. On the last twenty feet, the ledge extends beyond the face of the cliff and the level of difficulty goes way up, at least a 5.11, even 5.12. I made steady progress on the first pitch. On the way up, every fifteen feet or so, I emplaced a friend, which is a spring-loaded camming device. Emplacing protection is pretty simple; I would place a friend into a crack in the wall, release it to open the cam, lock it in, and then slip the rope into the carabiner pre-attached to the end of the friend.

  It took me only twenty-five minutes to make it up the first seventy-five feet. When I reached the overhang, what little light I had from the moon disappeared. I paused, flipped down my night vision, and studied the contours of the overhang above me. I depressed the push-to-talk switch on my radio.

  “This might get a little loud. How’s it looking above me, Mac?” I asked McDonald, who was watching the objective through the infra-red payload of a VBAT UAV he was orbiting three thousand feet above the estate.

  “It’s clear, no security in the back yard or porch,” McDonald said.

  “All right Migos, get ready,” I said through my throat microphone.

  “On belay,” he replied.

  I had six friends attached to my climbing harness that, instead of a carabiner connected to the attaching wire, had a six-inch loop of one-inch nylon tubing. I took the first one, reached as high as I could, and secured it above me. With my left hand, I grabbed the nylon loop I had just installed and swung out from the cliff face one-handed. At the end of my swing, I stuck the second friend into a crack with my right hand. As I began to swing back like a pendulum, I dropped my right hand into the loop of nylon. I was now hanging by both arms. I let go with my left hand and retrieved a third friend. Hanging with just my right arm, I started to kick and began to swing. With the momentum of my body going forward, I reached out with my left and stuck the friend into a waiting crack. Once again, I was hanging from both arms.

  My arms were trembling from the strain and my hands were burning from the straps. I only needed to create one more hand-hold to reach the edge. I let go of a loop with my right hand and reached down to retrieve another friend. My left arm was burning and then it wasn’t. I could picture in my mind the rock crumbling around the friend that was securing my left hand as I dropped from the overhang into the dark space below. I fell twenty feet, and then the rope attached to my climbing harness around my waist arrested my fall. Before I could register the pain in my groin, I swung into the cliff face and smacked hard against the wall. My helmet made a loud crack as it bounced off the rocky cliff face. I spun my body and turned toward the cliff face, my hands searching feverishly for something to hold. Once stable, I found toeholds to support my weight.

  “Are you good?” I heard Migos say.

  “Yeah, I almost made it. Give me a second,” I said as I straddled the climbing rope that led up to where I had emplaced my last protection.

  “Climbing,” I said.

  “On belay,” Migos replied. It was an easy climb back up to the dreaded overhang.

  “Give me some slack,” I said to Migos.

  “Wilco,” he replied.

  I retrieved a friend from my harness and looped the nylon around my right wrist. I grabbed the first handhold I had emplaced on the overhand with my left hand and I swung outward like a monkey and grabbed the second with my right hand. I let go with my left hand and kept the momentum going and grabbed the last loop with my left hand. I let go with my right and I dropped my arm to let the friend looped around my wrist fall into my right hand. At the limit of my forward movement, I stabbed the friend into the waiting crack and held on. Once again, I was hanging from both hands beneath the horizontal rock overhang. I let go with my left hand. This time the protection held. Once I stopped swinging, I reached down to my harness and retrieved a carabiner with a four-foot loop of nylon webbing attached. With my left hand, I attached the carabiner to the attaching wire of the same friend attached to the loop in the right hand. My arms began to tremble, and my hands were starting to burn from holding up my weight.

  I looked down and brought my right knee up and threaded my foot into the long nylon loop. Then I extended my leg and took all of the pressure off my rapidly failing arms. I was at the edge of the overhang. Now I just had to get myself over it. I emplaced another friend and, with another long loop of nylon, made another foothold. I secured the last foothold at the very edge of the overhang. I put my left foot into the new loop. I stepped out of my right foothold and rotated my body, so I was facing the cliff. I placed both hands on the edge of the cliff and pulled myself up by my arms. When my chest hit the cliff, I swung my right leg over the edge and rolled myself over the top. I rolled over onto my back at the top of the cliff.

  “I made it,” I said into the radio.

  “About time,” Migos said.

  “I cheated so bad, the entire mountaineering world is bowing its collective head in shame.”

  “I’m coming up. We’ll deduct your style points later,” Migos said.

  “Give me a minute to secure the rope.” I tied the rope to the small safety fence Turki had placed at the edge of his lawn to keep people from wandering off the edge of the cliff.

  “All clear,” McDonald said.

  “On belay,” I said. Migos came up fast, with the aid of a pair of jumar ascenders that effectively turn the rope into a ladder. He retrieved the protection I had emplaced on the way up. When he was finished and standing next to me on the cliff top, the rope hung straight down from the overhang. This was important to us, because rappelling dow
n that rope was part of our exit plan.

  Migos dropped his heavy pack and we divided up the gear. After I drank a liter of water and ate a power bar, I took the body armor and helmet he carried for me in the pack and put it on. In addition to stopping bullets, the vest had six magazines of spare ammunition for my suppressed M4 and six M67 frag grenades in the pouches.

  We approached the house from the back. The back yard was a football field. It was a hundred yards of flat open lawn, without even a single tree to hide behind. It was two in the morning, and except for Turki’s security, we didn’t expect anyone to be awake.

  The house was an imposing, two-story structure with a main structure and two smaller wings. It was made of grey stone and had several balconies. We were bypassing the swimming pool in the back when the backyard lights went on. I dropped to the prone and flipped up my NVGs as the firing started. We were both exposed on the open lawn. I laid down a base of fire aimed at the first-floor window where the first burst of fire came from. Migos sprinted the final fifty feet to the outer wall of the house. Once at the house, he moved to the offending window and tossed in a grenade.

  I ran to him after the grenade exploded. He followed me as I passed him and dove through the damaged window. Most of the lights had been turned on in the house. We entered a hallway in the west wing. Migos shot a guard trying to engage us as we made our way to the main entry. When we reached the entry, two guards fired down at us from the second-floor balcony overlooking the hall. We retreated to find a second set of stairs leading up to the second floor. We reached the end of the first-floor west wing hallway. I opened the door at the end of the hall and looked in. It was a garage. On one of the walls, I saw a fuse box. I killed the power to the house. We both dropped our NVGs and returned to the hallway.

  We found a second set of stairs off the kitchen. I led the way up. These were narrow servants’ stairs, and when I tried to exit into the second-floor west wing hallway, bullets pounded against the wall, inches above my head. I rolled a grenade toward the firer and dropped back down the stairs. The frag grenade created an enormous explosion inside the confined hallway. As soon as it detonated, I sprang out, with Migos close behind. I shot one of the guards who had engaged us earlier from the balcony area overlooking the main hallway. We advanced to that same balcony area. Fire from two directions caused the both of us to drop flat to the prone position. Three hallways jutted off from the main hallway; we had cleared one hallway and were receiving fire from the other two.

  “Which way?” Migos asked.

  “Turki will be down that hallway.” I pointed to the one that led down the east wing of the house.

  “We need to clear the other hallway before we can go down there,” he said.

  “This staircase is the nexus for the whole house. We need you to stay here to control it.” As I said that, automatic fire rang out from one of the rooms at the end of the north hallway.

  “Give me one of those LAWs,” I said.

  “It’s too close.”

  “Just go down the stairs a little.” Migos was lying prone next to the stairs; he slid down to the first landing. I extended the thermobaric rocket launcher and stuck it into the north-facing hallway that was perpendicular to the main hallway from where we were receiving the fire. Bullets ricocheted all around us, and muzzle flashes from the hallway were a nonstop light show. I pulled out the safety and fired the LAW down the narrow hallway in the general direction of the room where most of the fire was coming from. A huge explosion followed. Most of my body was behind the wall leading into the hallway, but I felt the wave of heat sweep past me as I ducked behind the wall. I picked up my rifle and headed down the east wing corridor to find Turki.

  The first room I entered was empty. It was a bedroom. I was wearing my night vision, and the laser from my rifle crisscrossed the room in a searching pattern. I went back into the hallway, and with my back against the wall, reached over to open the door to the next room in the hallway. Bullets blasted through the partially open wooden door. After I pulled the pin, I let go of the spoon of the grenade in my hand, counted to three and then tossed it through the door gap into the room behind.

  The blast shook the house. I continued my advance down the hallway. I went to the next room and then the next and the next. I used up all of my grenades before reaching the end of the corridor.

  “Any movement on your end?” I asked Migos.

  “I took care of it. I think all of the guards in this house are dead,” he replied.

  The house was on fire. The wing of the house where I had launched the LAW was burning, and the smoke was making it difficult to breathe and to see.

  “Come to me. It’s time to search those rooms I fragged,” I said.

  Migos and I entered each of the rooms off the hallway. We found dead guards in some of them, but no sign of Turki. The last room in the hallway, the room on the backside of the house, overlooking the lawn and the Strait of Gibraltar, was obviously the master bedroom. Two guards were in the main bedroom area and had been felled by the blast from my grenade. There was no sign of Turki.

  The room was enormous; it was connected to two large bathrooms and two walk-in closets.

  “I’ll bet his panic room is connected to one of these closets,” Migos said.

  “McDonald, how much time do we have?” I asked.

  “No reaction from police or fire. You have lots of time.”

  We checked both walk-in closets and didn’t find anything. I ran downstairs and turned the power back on. With the lights on, we saw things we missed with our night vision. Inside the linen closet in one of the bathrooms, Migos found a panel that opened into a narrow hallway. He pointed it out to me and I followed behind, down through a short hallway until it ended at a metal door. The door had to be the entrance to a panic room.

  “We’re going to need one of those steel-cutting shape charges,” I said. It was getting smokier in the hallway, as the fire in the west wing was growing. Migos went into his pack and retrieved a five-kilo shape charge. The explosive was shaped like a cone and was in a plastic mold that allowed it to be attached with the pointy side aimed at the wall.

  Migos started to tape the device to the metal door. There was a camera above the door, so I knew Turki knew what we were doing.

  “Don’t do that,” came a voice from an unseen speaker.

  “Don’t do what?” Migos replied.

  “Whatever you’re doing. Let’s talk, we can reach an agreement,” the speaker said.

  “Sorry, once you ordered the murder of my guys, the time for agreements ended. Don’t worry, the blast will kill you instantly; you won’t even feel the pain from the fire,” I said.

  “We’re coming out. Stop. We’re coming out. We surrender. Stop,” the speaker said, in a panicked voice.

  The hallway we were inside was cramped. Migos and I both backed out of the hallway and into the bathroom. We heard the metallic sounds of the door unlocking and a whoosh of air from an overpressure system when the panic room door unsealed. The first person we saw was a girl. She was a black girl wearing pajamas. Her eyes were wide with terror. We couldn’t see anyone behind her.

  “Drop to your knees and then lie flat on the floor,” I said. The girl didn’t move.

  “Drop and lay flat or we’ll shoot,” I said. Still, she continued to slowly creep towards us. Migos and I readied our weapons. Suddenly the girl bolted forward. Migos and I both fired. The girl dropped in the hallway before she could reach us. Then there was an explosion. I was blown backward onto the tile floors next to the bathtub. Dust and smoke filled the room. Gunfire erupted from the hallway behind the closet. I sat up and fired into the closet. I heard Migos engage from his position on the bathroom floor. I sprang up and rushed back into the closet and the hallway behind. I stepped over the badly blown up girl and shot a guard kneeling behind her. He was wounded and trying to reload his MP-5 with only one good arm. I noticed the panic room door was closing. I stuck the barrel of my rifle between the heav
y metal door and the frame, just before it fully closed. I let go of the stuck weapon and stuck my fingers into the narrow gap, prying the door open with both hands.

  I had the door almost all the way open when my chest exploded with pain. I fell straight back onto the dead guard in the hallway. A mad minute of gunfire erupted above me and then ended abruptly. I could barely breathe. I heard dragging behind me. Migos grabbed me by the handle on the collar of my body armor vest and dragged me out of the narrow hallway and into the bathroom.

  “Are you ok?”

  “It hit the plate,” I said in a raspy voice.

  Migos walked past me and went back into the hallway. A few seconds later I heard the distinct sound of a suppressed M4. Migos emptied a full magazine in rapid fire. I was up onto my knees by the time he emerged from the hallway.

  “We better get out of here,” I said.

  “Lead the way, boss.”

  We rappelled down the cliff. Migos went first. Before I stepped off, I looked at the house one last time. Smoke was billowing out of the upper floor windows. I let the rope play through my right hand and the figure-eight attached to my harness and abseiled to the water’s edge below.

  We put our dive gear back on and headed back to the yacht. I stayed barely below the surface for most of the route. After thirty minutes, I broke the surface and looked for the yacht. It took another ten minutes of skimming before we reached the boat. McDonald had to drag both of us onto the ramp. I was exhausted. My ribs were bruised, and even the salt water couldn’t rinse the taste of smoke from my mouth.

  I showered and went upstairs to the salon. The yacht was underway. McDonald was in the wheelhouse and had us on course for Paphos. Migos handed me a cold bottle of Sam Adams.

  “Here’s to Jankowski and Burnia,” he said.