WHATEVER THE COST: A Mark Cole Thriller

by J. T. Brannan

  But when they did, Navarone knew that the pirates wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Amir Al-Hazmi watched the volunteers as they went about their daily business in the compound. Men and women both, they had no work to do here, no chores as such, but each of them was an earnest true-believer and spent their time in deep prayer and meditation on what was to come.

  They had been selected by The Lion – Al-Hazmi was one of only a selected handful of people who knew his leader’s true identity as Abd al-Aziz Quraishi, Assistant Minister for Internal Affairs at the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Interior – a long time ago, chosen for their backgrounds, their religious zealotry, and their absolute trust in Quraishi and the ideals of Arabian Islamic Jihad.

  Al-Hazmi had known Quraishi for many years and had nothing but the highest regard for his master’s divine skills as a freedom-fighting mastermind. As he played with the curved, heavily-inscribed blade of his janbiya, the Arabic dagger characterized by both its curved short blade and its rhinoceros horn handle, Al-Hazmi thought back to how he and Quraishi had first met.

  Al-Hazmi had only been a young man at the time, but had already been fighting with Al-Qaida fi Jazirat al-'Arab – al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – for years, and was a hardened veteran of many violent campaigns.

  He had entered the life after his family had been killed during a botched raid on their home by Saudi Arabian security forces. Al-Hazmi had been a young boy when it happened, and had been forced onto the streets to take care of himself. And he had – his innate abilities with the janbiya, used against the criminals and street toughs who threatened him, soon brought him to the attention of the AQAP leadership. They took him in and provided him with a home, food, and religious education.

  It was at the madrassa where he had learnt about the true greatness of Allah and the corrupt perversions of the United States and her puppet, the House of Saud. He had been a willing student, and as well as his studies of the Qur’an, he soon excelled at the paramilitary training camps of Yemen and Syria.

  In his early teens he was a part of several successful operations, fighting against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the US troops had soon come to fear his janbiya, which he used to hack off souvenirs from dead soldiers and take them home for his grisly collection. But then his chance came to attack the heart of Saudi Arabia itself, a full-on assault of the Interior Ministry.

  At just nineteen years old, he had led the attack himself.

  But Allah, in His great wisdom, had decreed that the attack should fail, and Al-Hazmi and all of his colleagues had been captured and taken to the interrogation chambers below the government buildings of Riyadh.

  It was there that he saw Quraishi for the first time; but instead of torturing him, Quraishi instead lectured him about why AQAP’s attacks were doomed to failure; poor leadership, poor training and – most importantly, according to Quraishi – poor intelligence.

  Quraishi explained to Al-Hazmi that he wanted to use his power, his position, to lead a new jihad against the West and her allies; a jihad which would accomplish finally what all others had not – the annihilation of the Great Satan.

  Al-Hazmi had been impressed with the man’s arguments, and found himself inspired by Quraishi’s leadership.

  He had asked to join Quraishi’s fledgling organization then and there, and was accepted instantly, which made him one of the founding members of Arabian Islamic Jihad, and The Lion’s right-hand man.

  Over the intervening years, as the membership and reach of the secretive group grew and grew, Al-Hazmi acted as Quraishi’s enforcer and executioner, tasks which soon earned him his own title of respect in the organization – Matraqat al-Kafir, the Hammer of the Infidel.

  As one of the AIJ’s most senior operational leaders, Al-Hazmi had been entrusted by his master to secure and protect this all-important compound and to ensure that the upcoming operation went smoothly, including making sure that each and every volunteer boarded the correct planes at the correct time, and proceeded on to their destinations unhindered.

  One of the resident medical personnel at the compound would see to the technical requirements of the mission; even now they were hard at work examining the contents which had just arrived by private jet from Medan in northern Sumatra. Without direct access to the scientists who developed it, they would have to spend some time experimenting to know exactly how to use it in the most effective manner. But that was work which would occur in the underground laboratory, and Al-Hazmi found that he didn’t really want to know too much about it. He had been there once, and had no yearning to go back.

  Al-Hazmi knew that part of his job was to make sure that the volunteers didn’t have any second thoughts about what they were about to do, and so he had given clear instructions for them never to speak to the medical personnel, or to venture underground. Better for their motivation if they didn’t see what it was they had to do before the time was upon them.

  Not that Al-Hazmi had much to worry about; they had been chosen just as he had been chosen himself. All of the volunteers were true believers, religious warriors who would do anything for the cause. Like Al-Hazmi, most of their families had been raped, tortured and executed by Saudi or US troops, or else killed by indiscriminate bombings, ‘collateral damage’ which provided a never-ending supply of fresh blood to the cause.

  No, Al-Hazmi considered as he ran his thumb along the well-used blade of his priceless janbiya, he didn’t have to worry about the volunteers. And then he smiled broadly as he thought of what lay ahead.

  No, he thought happily, it was the Americans who should worry about the volunteers.

  2

  The square was in absolute chaos when Cole finally returned to ground level. He’d known that police and security personnel would be using the elevator and stairs, and so he had ridden down on the roof of the elevator car, waited until the coast was clear, and then lowered himself through the access hatch and merged with the crowds.

  Luckily, not enough time had elapsed for the authorities to cordon off the area or to secure it properly, and the square had been filled with hundreds of curious onlookers, many of whom were fixated by the two shattered bodies which had fallen from the top of the monument. It had been a relatively simply job for Cole to slip away in the confusion.

  He’d since escaped fifty miles west to the city of Serang, where he’d located an internet café and was enjoying a cup of bandrek – a hot drink of spiced coconut milk popular in western Java – as he worked on the dead arms broker’s encrypted cellphone.

  Cole used his hacking skills to piggyback onto one of the NSA’s decryption systems, and soon broke the encryption using sheer brute force. To Cole’s delight, the man had stored the contact details of many of his clients, one of whom was listed as Arief. Cole wasn’t surprised that Wong Xiang had such details; he would simply have believed that the sophisticated encryption would be enough to deter anyone who looked at his phone if it was ever lost.

  Not that Cole could be sure that the number would still be being used by the pirate leader; a quick check of the number showed that it was a throw-away prepaid cellphone, and could easily have been replaced since the last time Wong had contacted him. But with nothing else to go on, Cole decided to pursue the lead.

  Cole used the café’s secure landline modem to hack into the Indosat computer mainframe. He quickly called up the last known transmitter used by Arief’s cellphone, and found that it was a cellphone repeater station based in the town of Dumai on the coast of Sumatra – in the known operating zone of Liang Kebangkitan, and not a million miles away from where the Fu Yu Shan was hijacked.

  Sure he was onto something, Cole nevertheless wanted something more concrete before he set out to perform a physical reconnaissance. A cellphone transmitter was one thing, but what he really wanted was a current GPS location for the phone.

  Using the Indosat system, Cole remotely downloaded a tracking app to the pirate’s suspected cell phone and called up the information onto h
is own computer.

  It immediately came up with a list of GPS coordinates, which Cole fed into a mapping system, pinpointing the cellphone exactly.

  It seemed to be currently located on a narrow, unnamed island less than a mile long, sandwiched between the Sumatran mainland and the larger island of Pulau Rupat.

  Cole smiled; it was an ideal location for a pirate base, an unknown islet wedged in a narrow channel which would deter large military vessels from attacking, whilst offering plenty of opportunities for the pirates to escape if discovered – to the mainland, to Pulau Rupat, or out of the channel and into deeper waters.

  From the satellite maps, Cole could see that the island was heavily forested, the trees obscuring any rivers or internal channels which might be hiding a hijacked ship. In fact, at the resolutions offered by the maps, nothing of the little island except its vague shape could be made out at all.

  Due to the nature of the area, Cole doubted that even the high-definition real-time surveillance footage of a targeted drone aircraft would reveal much more – the vegetation covered everything, and Cole was sure that the ship would also be camouflaged and perhaps even hidden in a sheltered sea cave, making positive identification next to impossible.

  Cole wondered whether he should notify the US authorities, but thought better of it; what did he have to go on? At the moment, all he knew was that a cellphone which was linked to someone listed as ‘Arief’ was currently located on that little island. It could mean nothing, or it could mean everything, and Cole didn’t want valuable resources to be wasted if he was barking up the wrong tree.

  Cole sighed as he finished his bandrek. There was only one thing for it.

  He would have to find his way onto the island himself, and confirm that the Fu Yu Shan was actually there.

  And if it was, he would remain on-site to provide real-time recon intelligence for the special ops team which would undoubtedly be sent to rescue the hostages and blast the pirates back into the fifteenth century.

  The 35 day dry-aged rib-eye steak from the Shenandoah Valley Beef Cooperative tasted sublime as Jeb Richards consumed piece after mouthwatering piece.

  It wasn’t on the menu for that particular evening, but Secretary of State Clark Mason had spoken to the maître d’ of 1789 and – sure enough – it had become instantly available.

  The restaurant was one of the culinary icons of Washington DC, and was as good a place to spot political royalty as anywhere in the city. Richards knew that tongues might wag about his meeting with Mason, but who cared? They were both cabinet members, and meetings like this happened on a daily basis, especially at the city’s elite restaurants. Everyone knew that most of the important things which happened in the city originated over a good steak and a glass of wine during private meetings exactly like this one.

  It would have been much more newsworthy if they had tried to meet clandestinely; for nothing was ever a secret for long in Washington, and the press would have had a field day with conjecture about what they were discussing.

  As it was, relaxing in their mahogany chairs in the famous dining room, its cream-colored walls bedecked with centuries-old oil paintings, they were ignored completely; which suited Richards just fine.

  ‘So tell me you think this whole ship thing is a waste of time,’ Richards said through a mouthful of medium rare steak. The small talk was over for the evening, and now it was time for business.

  Mason wiped at the edge of his mouth with a thick white napkin and took a sip of his Puligny Montrachet, regarding Richards with keen eyes.

  ‘I wouldn’t perhaps go that far,’ Mason began diplomatically. ‘I certainly think it’s important for us to put on a show, make all the right noises, don’t you? Ellen was right about the treaty with China, which is shaky at the best of times. Do we want to upset them?’ He shook his head. ‘Not really.’

  ‘But –’ Richards began, before Mason cut him off with a wave of the hand.

  ‘Sorry Jeb, but I didn’t finish. I said I think the pretense of doing something is important, not the actual doing itself. I would favor taking no real action, the same as you. As it happens, I think you’re right; I don’t think the kidnapping of three Americans – Chinese Americans in actual fact, and ones that don’t even live here, don’t pay their taxes here – well, I don’t think it’s anything to lose sleep over in the overall scheme of things, do you?’

  Richards shook his head vigorously. ‘You’re damned right I don’t,’ he said. ‘A big waste of time and money is what it is. And it’s taking our eye off the ball, the things that really matter, you know? I mean, honestly, who gives a shit about a Chinese cargo ship?’

  Mason shrugged his shoulders, taking another sip of his wine. ‘Not me. But the president does, I’m afraid and – for now, at least – she’s in charge.’

  Richards smiled, knowing that Mason had his own eyes on Abrams’ job, fancied himself as the party’s chief candidate for the next election in just over four years’ time, when Abrams would step down after completing her second term. If she won the November election.

  But it was generally believed – and the polls supported the assumption – that Abrams would win again, her appeal still high after surviving the assassination attempt. Richards knew that Mason had no wish to oppose her directly this November; but he also knew that the Secretary of State did want that top job one day, and wanted to appeal to this sense of ambition.

  ‘You’re right,’ Richards said eventually as he slurped unceremoniously at his own wine, ‘you’re right. We can only hope that our next president’ – he looked pointedly at Mason as he spoke – ‘is more sensible, and has a better grip on both foreign policy and internal security.’

  Mason nodded his head in understanding. ‘Some of us take those things very seriously,’ he said with affected gravitas. ‘Very seriously indeed.’

  Richards nodded his own head, pretending to be impressed with Mason’s words, his dedication. ‘I think that perhaps this incident might play badly for Abrams,’ he said at last. ‘It would be most unfortunate of course, but – after committing to finding the ship as she’s done – if the Fu Yu Shan was never found, if – let’s say – certain obstructions were placed in her path – then it would be very embarrassing for her, politically speaking.’

  Mason smiled, warming to the idea. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘That would be very unfortunate, wouldn’t it?’

  Richards smiled as he watched Mason finish his wine and gesture for the attendant waiter to pour him another glass. Mason picked it up, and Richards joined him with his own. ‘Here’s to the Fu Yu Shan,’ Mason said over the tinkling of crystal.

  ‘The Fu Yu Shan,’ Richards agreed, knocking back his own glass.

  So Mason was aboard, he thought happily; and his own personal agenda was now one notch more secure.

  ‘Yes my friend,’ Abd al-Aziz Quraishi said into the secure telephone which rested on his office desk, ‘in sha’Allah.’ If God wills it.

  It always amused him when infidels attempted to impress him with their vain attempts at expressing Islamic concepts. Quraishi knew that – for the man on the other end of the line – they were entirely empty words, devoid of meaning. For how could an infidel ever hope to understand?

  But it did not matter to Quraishi; all it meant was that The Lion was a man who others needed to impress, even the man on the phone; a man with some considerable power in his own world, but who wielded no control at all over the leader of Arabian Islamic Jihad.

  Quraishi put the phone down without another word and stretched out, pleased with how the day was progressing so far. This was the second good news he had received; he had already spoken earlier to Amir al-Hazmi, his beloved Hammer of the Infidel, who had assured him that preparations at the operations base were coming along exactly as planned. The scientists had not only received the necessary package, but were making good progress in understanding how to get the most out of it.

  Quraishi stood and moved to his window, staring ou
t at the busy streets of Riyadh below. The people of Saudi Arabia went about their daily lives with no idea about how those lives were about to be changed. Saudi Arabia – even the name of his beloved land offended him; but it wouldn’t last long.

  For no longer would there be the corrupt rule of the House of Saud, in thrall to the American government and defiling their great nation with their continuous dealings with the hateful Satan. The hypocrisy of the regime continued to amaze Quraishi even after all these years; how could a nation which espoused shariah law and a strict interpretation of Islam also allow such gross disbelievers to desecrate their holy lands with their armed forces? How could they engage in business deals and political relationships with the enemy? It made Quraishi physically sick to think about it, but soon – very soon – America would fall, and without the backing of that nation’s all-powerful military, the King and his entire regime would crumble to dust under the might of The Lion and the AIJ.

  None of the citizens in the street looked up at the building which housed the Ministry of Interior, and Quraishi was not in the least bit surprised. The Ministry was responsible for the Mabahith, the feared secret police unit which pulled men, women and children kicking and screaming from their beds in the dead of night and dragged them away to the brutal interrogation chambers dug out of the cool earth underneath the city – some located within the three subterranean levels of this very building.

  Quraishi had worked within the Mabahith himself for many years – a perfect cover for a man his own organization would have recognized as a terrorist – and it had been a horrific time. To maintain his cover and progress his position, he had had to willingly torture and execute his fellow freedom-fighters, his fellow believers.

  It had taken an enormous force of will to do the things that he had done, but he had trusted in Allah that it was all for a reason, believed that it would be worth the sacrifice when his final mission came to fruition, as it was now doing.