The Scorpion's Gate

by Richard A. Clarke

Buford now heard the thuds from his two Zodiacs attacking the propellers. If they had succeeded in hitting the large propellers, the ship would slow, but its forward momentum would continue to push it up-channel toward the Navy base. He yelled to the chief, “If they are going to blow the LNG, now’s the time they will try to do it. We got to get on board now and stop them.”

  “Boarding party, aye, sir,” the chief screamed back.

  Buford coordinated with the other Zodiacs so that all four would launch their climbers up different parts of the ship, then pull back to give the climbers covering fire from the machine guns.

  As his boat pulled up next to the tanker, that 200 feet to the deck seemed like a mile of steel looming above them, and moving ahead. Buford yelled to three SEALs in his Zodiac, “Pull out the beanstalk.” They brought out a titanium device that looked only 6 feet high, but its two thick poles contained extensions. Buford pressed the launch button, and the poles shot 75 feet into the air. Between the poles, thin, narrow steps made a ladder. Suction cups and magnets on the sides of the poles attached themselves to the tanker. They moved their Jack and the Beanstalk tower so that it hooked onto a scupper on the side of the tanker, then started to ascend, Buford first.

  The Zodiac pulled back out, to get an angle where they could take any people on the deck under fire. Normally, the SEALs would have had their own helicopters, Little Birds, with SEALs sitting outside on the landing gear, providing covering fire. Unfortunately, the Little Birds were training on barges out in the Gulf with most of the SEAL team. Buford was left at home to guard the fort, literally.

  As the Zodiac moved off from the tanker, Buford was startled by a noise and a motion above. He looked up from the water to see flames from the tales of two Bahraini F-16s as they shot by 500 feet above the sea. He hoped they knew they should do nothing but look good. Then he heard another, more familiar sound: Black Hawks. The rest of the FAST had arrived on three or four more birds, and so far they were not being targeted with Stingers.

  Buford quickly switched to the FAST frequency. “FAST Commander, this is Alpha Three One, I have a dozen men climbing up the sides at positions one, two, and six. I need covering fire from your helos. Suggest we put all men on board on one tactical freq. Over.”

  “Roger, Alpha, we will rope down into positions three, four, and five. We will fire at the deck near your positions until you get topside,” the Marine in the lead chopper responded, using the numbers that the SEALs and Marines both employed to designate locations on a ship being assaulted from the air or from the sea’s surface. “Alpha, have your men switch to tac freq 198.22, over.”

  Buford and his team had climbed the beanstalk, hooked onto the side, and pulled the ladder up behind them. They then fired it up another 75 feet and hooked on. After the second climb of the tower, they shot ropes onto the deck. When the ropes seemed to be securely caught on something on the deck, the SEALs began climbing the last stretch of the steel behemoth.

  Buford could hear small-arms fire now. He imagined some terrorist leader inside the ship lighting charges that would explode the five gigantic gas-carrying spheres. Even from here the explosion would create a blast wave and fireball that would kill hundreds at the ASU. Any moment now...

  Above it all, Buford heard a siren. Turning, he saw the Bahraini patrol craft charging at full speed up the channel, all lit up and with a blue bubble-gum light blinking on its tower like a highway patrol car. Then he heard someone on the headset saying, “Hovering above the debris of the Defender...No joy...No joy.” They weren’t seeing survivors of the Coast Guard boat.

  Machine guns on the Zodiacs and the Black Hawks were now ripping at parts of the deck area of the Jamal where someone might try to shoot at the SEALs as they climbed up the sides or at the Marines, who were about to rappel down ropes onto the ship. “Keep your fire way from the spheres,” Buford heard someone say on his headset.

  Then, as the SEALs neared the deck, he heard, “Cease fire, cease fire, only targeted fire on hostiles.” Finally, he was on the deck. The muscles in his forearms burned, his biceps and back throbbed. He had designated the four SEAL assault units of four men each red, blue, green, and gold. He and the three other SEALs from his Zodiac were gold. “This is Gold One. We are on deck,” Buford said, swinging his assault weapon from his back to his right hand. The other SEAL squads soon confirmed that they, too, had made it on deck. Sixteen SEALs were aboard the Jamal. None had been lost in the perilous climb up the side of the ship.

  The SEALs assumed positions behind objects on deck to provide covering fire as the FAST Marines now fell onto the deck on the port and starboard sides. Another FAST squad was, Buford knew, hitting the bow. Buford was on the stern deck. His view of the bow was obscured by the smoke from the smoldering conning tower of the tanker. The Javelins had done a good job.

  “Blue squad, join up with Gold. We’ll go below to find the auxiliary controls in the engine room,” he yelled into his headset. “Green, Red, join up with the FAST and go down amidships, look for booby traps and timers, any sign that someone is trying to blow up the ship.” Then he transferred all tactical control to the FAST team leader, a Marine captain. Once he went below, there was little probability that his radio would be able to transmit more than a few feet.

  He pulled open a hatch and realized that the lights were out inside the ship. He pulled down his nightscope, and using hand signs, Buford and his squad entered the ship. He tried to remember the deck plans from his laptop. The two squads moved below down a darkened companionway. They descended three decks, providing cover for one another as they moved, just as they had drilled so many times.

  He opened the hatch into the corridor. If he remembered correctly, the second door on the left would be the auxiliary helm control room, and from there the ship could be steered. According to the data he had read on the laptop as the Zodiac bounced out to the Jamal, this ship also had two emergency mini-propellers amidships. He wanted to deploy them and throw them to full throttle in reverse.

  Buford and the rest of Gold squad found the door and assumed their positions to go through it together, high and low, covering one another. He pulled down the latch handle, and in a second they were in. “No shoot, no shoot,” an Asian man in a T-shirt screamed. Buford saw no one else in the room through his night-vision goggles.

  “Are you from the Jamal’s crew?” Buford yelled as he placed his weapon to the Asian’s chest. The terrified man nodded affirmatively. “Where are the midship props and rudder controls?” Buford barked.

  The Asian’s hand went out to a switch. “No!” Buford screamed, and knocked him away. The SEAL wanted to see the controls for himself. It looked fairly user-friendly and intuitive. Everything was marked in Japanese and English.

  “This should do it,” he said to the rest of his squad as he hit a button that deployed the mini-props. Then he dialed in full reverse. “It will at least stop what’s left of the forward motion and in a few minutes it’ll start slipping her backwards. Now let’s start looking for explosives.”

  The young SEAL lieutenant grabbed the quivering Asian ship’s crewman by the T-shirt and threw him back into the chair in front of the console, exactly where he had been sitting when the SEALs burst in. “Where are they? Where are the terrorists?” Buford screamed at the frightened sailor. “Tell me now!”

  Almost in answer, a shape moved in the dark. From behind a file cabinet the sound of gunfire exploded in the little control room. Above it, Buford heard a shout: “Allah ahkbar!” He swung to his right, beginning to raise his weapon as he took three rounds into his body armor, one above the other. Then one pierced the skin at the top of his nose and his head exploded as his body fell backward onto the control panel.

  Fire from two SEALs in the control room cut the gunman in two. With the sound of the weapons exchange causing his ears to ring and his nostrils to fill with acrid smoke, a SEAL hit the transmit button on his chin microphone. “Gold One is down. KIA, repeat Gold One KIA.” No one on deck could he
ar the signal through the steel of the hull.

  ...

  Still hogging the bartender’s binoculars and juggling them with her cell phone, pressed against the window glass at the Top of the Corniche, Kate Delmarco was dictating to a CNN news anchor in Atlanta. She had been at it for half an hour, her reports also turning into bulletins that the Associated Press was running on its global network.

  “The helicopters are still hovering above the deck and are scanning below with really bright spotlights. The troops from the helicopters have been on the deck now for almost ten minutes, but I can’t make them out. The fire seems to have gone out in the tower thing.” She squinted. “And I’d say the ship is definitely dead in the water. A lot of little ships are now around it and I can see the lights of more on the way. One has a blue, like a police light, spinning.... The fighter planes are still circling higher up. I can’t confirm the report that the American base was evacuated, but this huge liquid natural gas tanker definitely was headed that way, and had it been exploded by terrorists, thousands would have died, Americans and Bahrainis. I must stress that we do not know the identity of the terrorist group yet, despite rumors that may have appeared.”

  The bartender, who had never before had such a high tipper as this American woman, hung up his telephone behind the bar and wrote a note on a napkin. He walked around the bar to the window and placed the napkin in front of Delmarco. It read, “Man from hospital call you. He say shokran jazeelan. Just tell you shokran.”

  No, Kate thought, as tears welled up in her eyes. Thank you very much, Doctor, thank you.

  ...

  Across town, in a small office on the intensive care ward at the Salmaniyah Medical Center, Dr. Rashid was composing an encrypted e-mail to his brother, Abdullah, in Riyadh.

  . . . although the Iranians may try to manufacture evidence. Those the Americans captured on the tanker are Iraqi Shiites, who should lead them to the Iranian Qods Force involvement.

  The American newspaper reporter I met at Nakeel’s suggestion, she was how I told the Americans about the attack in time for them to stop it. She will say Islamyah was not involved in the attack, in fact helped to stop it.

  I think they will believe her. Nakeel said she has good sources in the military and intelligence. I must ask Nakeel how he knows her. Sometimes, Abdullah, I wonder about our friend Nakeel and how he knows so much if he just develops real estate. For now, at least, we have stopped Tehran from staging a major massacre of Americans and blaming it on us. But, I am sure, they will not stop. There will be more. In your service, Ahmed.

  5

  FEBRUARY 5

  Vauxhall Cross, London

  Headquarters, Secret Intelligence Service

  “It gives me the willies just to be in this place, Pammy,” Brian Douglas confided to Pamela Braithwaite, executive assistant to the Director of SIS. “I’d be afraid to work in a glass palace like this, it’s just too vulnerable.”

  “Yes, well, you’ll recall, or maybe you won’t, Brian, you were in the Dhofar with the Omanis, I do believe, running ops into the Yemen looking for al Qaeda back in 2000 when it happened”—Pamela shut her eyes to remember the scene—“when a Russian antitank missile came crashing into the eighth floor here. The Irish. Made a terrible mess, we moved everyone off the floor for three months. Now, of course, we have surveillance cameras throughout the neighborhood and police boats on the Thames....”

  Barbara Currier, Director of SIS, strode in carrying a stack of papers, followed by Middle East Division Chief Roddy Touraine.

  “Well, Brian, you leave Bahrain for a day and the place goes to hell in a handbasket,” she said, thrusting out her hand to Douglas.

  “I was surprised by the timing of it, Director, but we had just told the Americans it was coming relatively soon,” Brian said defensively.

  “Sit, sit,” the Director urged. “Yes, I made a point of that to their Director of National Intelligence this morning on the vid link. And he acknowledged it, more’s the wonder.”

  “My station staff have done great work in the last twenty-four hours finding out more about the details, if you’d like to hear them, Director,” Brian offered, pulling out his notes. Currier nodded enthusiastically while pouring herself a cup of Earl Grey.

  “Those the Americans found on board were Iraqis, maybe Sunni, maybe Shi’a. Don’t know yet. Most of them got killed by the Marines in the firefight, but the SEALs captured one alive who said they were ordered not to detonate the ship until they had rammed a U.S. destroyer or run aground on the base. They had rigged two of the five natural gas spheres with enough RDX to set off a firestorm that would have lashed out almost three kilometers.

  “Our traces as to how they got into Bahrain, where they stayed, et cetera, indicate that they were facilitated by a front company called Medkefdar Trading, which we link back through Hezbollah to the Iranian Qods Force.

  “The Americans were alerted just before the attack by an American newspaper reporter, who in turn claims to have been warned by what she describes as an Islamyah source; we’re checking on who that may be. I can find out. This does, however, confirm my earlier reporting that the terrorism in Bahrain is from Iran and not from Islamyah,” he said, folding the notes back up.

  “Not what I’m hearing from across the pond,” Roddy Touraine piped up. “A ruse, they say. The Yanks are still keen that it’s the al Qaeda regime in Riyadh.” Roddy Touraine had once used the commercial cover of an accountant, and he looked the part.

  “It’s not an al Qaeda regime, although there may be some ex–alQaeda in it,” Douglas shot back.

  “Ex–al Qaeda? Can one be ex–al Qaeda, Director?” Roddy Touraine asked rhetorically to Barbara Currier. “I would have thought once one, always one. Can a camel change its spots?”

  “You mean like once a Pentagon liaison always a Pentagon toady?”

  Brian flashed.

  “Children, children, enough,” the Director asserted, chopping the air with her hand. “What’s next, that’s what I want to know.

  How do we stop these attacks? How do we prove—prove—whose hand is behind them?”

  “Director, if I may,” Brian began. “As you know, I ran a small but highly effective network in Tehran several years back. I met them

  outside of the country, but from time to time I went in under commercial cover. My successor shut down the network because one of

  the group was caught and killed by VEVAK in Baku. Rather than risk the rest, we put the net into hibernation.

  “As far as we know, the rest of the group were never revealed and are still in positions to know much of what we need now. I’d like to

  go back in, activate one of them, and see what we can find out about the Iranian role in Bahrain and what they are up to in general, in

  Iraq, with the nuclears, the whole ball of wax.”

  The room was quiet for a moment. Brian heard a siren going by on the embankment below.

  “Personally? You want to activate them by going in country, personally?” Touraine asked incredulously. “Don’t they know you by

  now? Haven’t you been made by VEVAK?”

  “If I stayed there any length of time, they would have time to match photographs, but that will take a few days, and that’s all I need,” Douglas insisted. “There is no way to contact this source or the others in the cell remotely, and I am the only one left here that

  our network know, will recognize. Yes, there is some danger, but it’smoder ate, and I am prepared to accept it.”

  “Danger to you, fine. Accept away,” Touraine shot back, “but it’s a danger to the Director, the Service, and HMG if the Iranians announce to the world that they’ve captured a senior SIS officer traipsing about the whorehouses of Tehran with secret Iranian government documents!”

  Now there was only the noise of the heating system. SIS Director Barbara Currier was sketching butterflies on her notepad. “We do need to take risks. We are not the Girl Guides,” she said finally, standing to
shake Brian’s hand, indicating that their meeting

  was over. “Just don’t get caught, Brian, will you, now?” Pamela Braithwaite walked Brian to the elevators. “There’s being a field man, Brian, and then there’s being a cowboy.” He shot her a glance. “I thought you were a friend.” “I am. Why do you think she approved this little adventure of yours? I told her this morning she could trust you.” Pamela smiled.

  “Don’t prove me wrong and Roddy right.”

  Brian smiled back. “Thank you. Without you I’m sure Roddy would have torpedoed the whole thing. I just don’t trust that man.

  Always running to Grosvenor Square, telling all to Uncle Sam. I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not going to run the operational details about

  this mission through that bastard.”

  Pamela walked back toward the Director’s suite. “No, I will dothe needful with Ops, get you cover, backup, emergency egress

  plans... make sure you’re authorized all the little bits that you will need... TTFN.”

  Office of the Intelligence Coordinator and Chairman,

  Joint Intelligence Committee

  The Cabinet Office

  Whitehall, London

  “Delighted you could come over, Russell. Always willing to return a favor for Sol, work my way a little out of his debt. We’ve been wondering how this new analysis agency has been coming along, hoping we could learn a thing or two from you.” Sir Dennis Penning-Smith was in his late sixties, with a full head of thick white hair, and, in his three-piece suit and wire-rim glasses, looked somehow appropriate in this old government office building on Whitehall. He looked beaked, birdlike; he could have been a senior don at Cambridge, Rusty thought. But he was anything but that.

  “Sir Dennis, as Intelligence Coordinator and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, you know far more about analysis than we could aspire to for years. Your track record here at JIC is better than anything Washington’s produced over the last twenty years,” Rusty replied.