by Oliver North
Blackman simply nodded.
“I think,” said Hadley, picking up again, “much of the concern at the Home Office began yesterday when the Americans circulated those photographs along with the BOLO of the people they had captured that showed those special containers to hold nuclear weapons installed aboard those stolen Saudi ships and aircraft. Our aviation and Port Security people now want us to inspect every sport plane and fishing boat for similar containers.”
Blackman looked at the two men he had known for years and asked. “So you want to know what's going on? Are we a target like the Americans? What should we be anticipating? Right?”
Hadley and Stevens both nodded their heads, then took out pencils and paper to take notes.
“Well, let's all understand something right up front,” began Blackman. “What I'm about to share with you is Foreign Intelligence Information—and cannot be sourced back to the SIS or we'll all be in the dock.”
“Quite,” said Stevens, putting down his pencil.
Blackman continued. “You already know all that's relevant about the American operation that netted the two Saudi yachts off Majorca on Friday night-Saturday morning. Since then their SEALs have taken down another one in Portugal.”
“How about aircraft?” Stevens asked.
“One has been impounded in Mexico, and the South African Rangers helped an American Delta Force unit seize another in Johannesburg,” Blackman responded. “All of the ships and planes were outfitted to carry nuclear weapons,” he added, knowing that this would be a surprise to them, “as was the Saudi vessel seized by our lads from the Special Boat Service early this morning off Sidi-Fredj, Algeria.”
At this, Stevens dropped his pen. Hadley's head snapped up and he said, “Algeria, you say. Well, Joseph, kind of Her Majesty's Secret Service to let us in on the fun.” He then added dryly, “Would you care to tantalize us with some of the details?”
Blackman smiled and said, “It all happened just before dawn. C said that you would want to be aware.”
“To say the least,” said Stevens.
“It all came down rather fast,” Blackman continued. “After the Americans seized the two vessels off Palma, our GCHQ SigInt site at Gibraltar picked up some unusual emissions from Sidi-Fredj. With the help of the frigate HMS St. Albans they pinpointed the source as a two-hundred-foot yacht calling itself Saladin's Prize. A quick check with Lloyd's showed that there was no such name in their registry, so yesterday morning we sent a few boys from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment to Sidi-Fredj to check her out.”
“Any help from the Algerian authorities?” asked Hadley.
Blackman shook his head. “No. Didn't have time to ask. Our lads reported that the crew of the vessel consisted of five bearded males, four of Middle Eastern appearance, one apparently Slavic-Caucasian. Turns out they were right—he's Russian. They were staying at the El Manar Resort Hotel ashore and taking turns guarding their ship.”
“Ah, there you go, ‘profiling’ again, Joseph. What are we to do with you?” said Stevens in mock disapproval. “What happened next?”
Blackman ignored the jibe and continued, “Last night C authorized the SBS lads to take down the vessel. Simultaneously, they grabbed the three that were ashore, brought them out to the boat, and the whole ‘lot and caboodle’ are now on the way to Her Majesty's Sovereign Base at Gibraltar. No mess, no fuss. All very tidy.”
“Was there a nuclear weapon aboard?” asked Hadley.
“No weapons either,” Blackman replied, “just the same kind of lead-lined steel box in the bilge and wiring like the Americans reported in the two that they seized and in the photos they circulated from the one impounded in Mexico.”
“I realize this is a bit off my turf, as it were,” interjected Hadley, “but is the Foreign Office aware that we are about to have a pirated Saudi vessel pull into Gibraltar?”
“Not sure,” answered Blackman. “But just as I left to come over here, C was chatting with the PM on the phone, so I assume that the Foreign Office will be in the loop on that matter very soon, if not already.”
“Any indication where this vessel was headed before our chaps so rudely took it away from them?” asked Stevens.
“Apparently the ship's navigation system was programmed for a straight run through to Caracas, Venezuela,” answered the MI6 officer.
“One last question, Joseph,” said Hadley. “What do you plan to do with these five ‘pirates’ you have apprehended?”
“Why, Evan,” said Blackman with just the hint of a smile, “I thought that they would be welcome at a detention facility with a great reputation for discretion—and getting good results from interrogations. How about your place here?”
“Well, I've no problem taking in these jihadist thugs, holding them incommunicado under our ‘Special Powers’ laws, and ‘sweating’ them a bit,” replied Hadley. “It's the Russian I'm concerned about. Moscow is sure to raise a stink when they find out. Anyway, what the devil are the Ruskies doing in this mess? Given their problems in Chechnya, I'd have thought they would be with us on this one.”
“Can't tell you what the Russians are doing in all of this—yet,” replied Blackman. “But C wants to find out, so yesterday we asked for a little help from ‘our friends’—to paraphrase John Lennon, or was it Paul McCartney? I actually can't remember.”
“Our friends?” Stevens asked. “What friends?”
Blackman looked his Scotland Yard counterpart in the eye and said, “The Norwegians.”
São Pedro Airport
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St. Vicente Island, Cape Verde Islands
Monday, 29 October 2007
1315 Hours Local
Pilot Is'haaq Al Kabil keyed the microphone switch on the control yoke of the Boeing 737 and in perfect English said, “Dakar Flight Control, this is Air Afrique Cargo Flight Juliet Six One One Seven in transit to Cape Verde Islands, level at thirty-one thousand, squawking one three two five.”
“Go ahead, Six One One Seven, we have you,” replied the air traffic controller outside the capital of Senegal, two hundred miles east and six miles below.
“Roger, Dakar,” replied Al Kabil. “Request permission to make an in-flight change from the flight plan we filed before leaving Freetown, Sierra Leone.”
“State your request, Six One One Seven.”
“Roger, Dakar, we're experiencing an intermittent cabin pressurization warning indication. Request permission to descend to twenty-one thousand and land at São Pedro Airport on St. Vicente Island instead of Santa Maria International Airport on Sal Island.”
“Wait, out,” responded the controller. Then thirty seconds later, he came back and said, “Juliet Six One One Seven, this is Dakar. Change approved. Descend to two-one-thousand. Contact São Pedro tower on one-twenty-six-point five. Good day.”
Kabil acknowledged receiving the approval and smiled as he approached the ten tiny islets of the Cape Verde chain. He had been told by the Russian sleeping in the back of the aircraft that the plane's new paint job was less likely to attract attention at São Pedro than at the much busier International Airport.
Forty minutes later, and fifty nautical miles from his destination, São Pedro Approach gave Juliet Six One One Seven instructions to land on runway zero two, right. “Roger, One One Seven, turning right ten degrees, switching to ILS,” Kabil said as he switched off the autopilot and tuned the radio beacon to the assigned frequency. He then turned to his copilot and said in Arabic, “Descend to seven thousand feet and reduce airspeed from 320 to 240 knots.”
A few minutes later, as the twin dormant volcanic peaks on opposite ends of the island appeared through a brief rain squall, his copilot said, “Airspeed two forty, altitude seven thousand.”
Al Kabil reached forward on the console between the two men, extended the flaps on the 737 to the first position, took the controls from his copilot—and made a perfect approach. He only needed to check the Glide Slope indicator once
as they made their descent to the runway.
Eight nautical miles from the airport, Kabil fully extended the flaps and increased power as the big panels extended behind the wing increased the “drag” by acting like a brake. When the airspeed indicator showed 160 knots he flipped the round wheel-shaped lever on the front panel down, and the landing gear extended and locked.
There was a barely perceptible jolt as the big plane touched down with its nose wheel on the centerline of the tarmac. Kabil smoothly shifted the throttles to reverse thrust, flipped a switch to elevate the “air brake” panels on tops of the wings, and applied pressure to the tips of the rudder pedals, braking the 737 to stop 2,000 feet from the end of the runway. As he taxied toward the “air freight” FBO at the far end of the airport, his copilot said, “Nice landing, Is'haaq” in Arabic.
“Thank you,” said Kabil, then he added, “but it should have been a good landing, Jabbar. I have logged almost three hundred hours in this very airplane.”
It was not a boast. Kabil had been a pilot in the Royal Saudi Air Force and had been the chief pilot for the owner of this 737, Prince Muneer al-Taif, for more than four years. And unlike nearly all of the other Saudi aircraft and vessels that had been commandeered by the “Islamic Brotherhood,” this one had been easy to acquire.
On the tenth of October, Kabil had flown Prince Muneer and one of his young European concubines to the Seychelles for a “holiday.” Late on the afternoon of the fourteenth, when the prince learned of the “coup” in Saudi Arabia, he arrived planeside in a panic, demanding that Kabil fly him immediately to Egypt.
The chief pilot took off as ordered, but the prince and his Dutch girlfriend never arrived in Cairo. Four hours into the flight, Kabil put the plane on autopilot, went to the ornate stateroom in the middle of the jet, and, using a .25 cal. pistol, shot the prince and his blonde once each in the head. When he landed in Khartoum, members of the “brotherhood” met the plane, removed the bodies, and secreted the plane in a rented hangar. Kabil had spent the next two weeks waiting for orders while his “colleagues” installed their “special equipment.”
Now, with the aircraft parked, Kabil walked back to the master bedroom where he had murdered the owner and his girlfriend and examined the lead-lined stainless steel box that had replaced the bloodstained bed. He looked at the empty container and the wire harness running from it and whispered, as though talking to a small child, “It will not be long now. Soon we will bring a fiery vengeance upon the infidels. Praise be to Allah.”
HQ, 5th Fleet
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U.S. Naval Facility, Bahrain
Monday, 29 October 2007
2050 Hours Local
The USS Jimmy Carter surfaced and entered port as soon as it was dark. Capt. “Sandy” Heflin, the sub's Operations Officer, and two of his “Communications Spooks” had come ashore immediately for briefings by the 5th Fleet staff and a man from the CIA introduced simply as “Herb.” He'd left his XO and the chief of the boat to supervise the installation of special fittings that were being welded to his sub's hull so they could transport their “special cargo” to their “mission area.”
As Heflin arrived at the Fleet Support Activity landing, he got his first look at the ASDS—Advanced SEAL Delivery System—that would sever the undersea Iran-Saudi Arabia fiber-optic telephone cable—once his submarine found it. The mini-sub and its accompanying six-man SEAL team were on the big concrete pier as Heflin and his team disembarked from a launch dispatched by the admiral.
The sixty-five-foot-long ASDS had been flown from Groton, Connecticut—directly to Bahrain—inside a USAF C-17. Transporting it three miles from the U.S. military side of the Bahrain airport to the U.S. Navy's Fleet Support pier without “tipping our hand” had been an issue of great debate on the 5th Fleet staff. Finally, a Navy master chief said, “Let's just cover the thing with a tarpaulin and haul it down the highway. None of the jihadi agents are going to know what it is. Hey, most of you people don't even know what it looks like.”
By the time Heflin, his officers, and the SEAL detachment leader, Lt. Paul Van Hooser, were seated in the admiral's conference room, listening to “Herb” and others describe their mission, the mini-sub, nicknamed the Minnow, was being lifted by crane from its specially built transport carriage and lowered into the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. Rather than risk damage by towing it out to the sub, the ASDS, powered by its internal 67-hp electric motor, made its own way the eight hundred yards to where the Jimmy Carter was riding quietly at a mooring.
“The ASDS weighs fifty-five tons dry—but it has neutral buoyancy in the water,” said a U.S. Navy commander, standing at the front of the room next to a PowerPoint display of the mini-sub. As the image on the screen changed to a computer-assisted design of the ASDS mounted aft of the Jimmy Carter's sail, he continued, “As long as you do not exceed twenty knots, we believe that the fittings we're installing should be adequate to withstand the force of the water pressing against the hull of either vessel.”
Only slightly mollified by that information—and the fact that the commander was wearing the gold dolphins of the submarine service—Heflin asked, “What's this going to do to my depth and diving capabilities? And how about noise?”
“We have all the tables worked out and will provide the depth-dive tables to you on a CD and on paper before you leave, Captain,” answered the commander. “There is some good news on noise signature for the ASDS. It's been equipped with new, composite material, anticavitation screws—so when you detach the mini-sub it will be almost as quiet as you are.”
When the engineering experts finished, the “intel-types” took over. Heflin noticed that the Fleet Intelligence officers all deferred to “Herb” on this part of the brief. The CIA officer concluded his presentation by restating what to Heflin was the obvious, “Once you have used your onboard sensors to determine the proper cable that needs to be cut, get the most accurate fix you can on the location. You'll be on the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf, out of the shipping lanes, but it's important that you aren't detected when you come up to detach the ASDS.”
“How long will it take you to cut this cable?” Heflin asked Van Hooser.
“It depends on our visibility at depth,” the SEAL officer responded. “Looking at the charts, it appears that we'll be at about five hundred feet. If the water is clear and we don't have any problems, we could be done in less than an hour.”
“And then we surface to take the Minnow back aboard?” asked Heflin.
“That's the idea,” responded Herb.
“Easy for you to say,” responded Heflin. “What's the latest on mines and the Iranian Kilo subs? I'd hate to have to deal with either one while we're trying to take Lieutenant Van Hooser's SEALs and their sexy little machine back aboard.”
“Herb” said nothing and looked instead at the senior Fleet Intelligence officer who looked uncomfortably at Heflin and said, “I'm sorry to say, Captain, that we don't know about mines, and two of the Iranians' subs seem to be unaccounted for.”
Narvik-Andoya Science Facility
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Tromsö, Norway
Monday, 29 October 2007
2300 Hours Local
It was pitch black, icy cold, and the Aurora Borealis—the northern lights—were shimmering in the air as the C-130 turned on its lights, five miles from the end of the frozen runway, ten degrees south of the Arctic Circle. It would soon be moerketiden in northern Norway—the two-month period when the sun doesn't rise above the horizon. Standing beside the tiny control tower, Maj. Carl Arvildsun, Royal Norwegian Army, clapped his hands together to stay warm—and wondered why he had volunteered for this mission.
Though he could see little beyond the dim lights of the runway, the Norwegian officer knew that he was standing in a level basin surrounded by terrain that had been shaped by huge glaciers that had also gouged out Arctic fjords and left monumental rock formations. N
ot far from the airfield was the ancient town of Tromsö, settled by farmers and fishermen during the Viking era. Some of that early identity had been preserved—there were still a number of sod-roofed cottages and ornate wooden buildings in the town of three thousand people. Occasionally, small herds of reindeer could be seen at the edge of the town, pawing through the snow, searching for hidden moss or buried grass.
In the Tromsö town square there was a statue honoring Roald Amundsen, the pioneer Arctic and Antarctic explorer who died in a plane crash while searching for a missing Italian adventurer. In another nearby park there was a memorial to the valor of eleven Norwegian resistance fighters who were captured, brutally interrogated, and then killed by German occupation troops during World War II. One of them had been Arvildsun's uncle.
The base—where the Norwegian major now awaited the approaching C-130—had been built by the British, used by the Americans during the Cold War, and now served both the Royal Norwegian Air Force and the Norwegian Weather Service. From here and the Naval Station at Narvik, 120 miles to the south, scientific rockets were routinely launched into the Arctic skies to study everything from wind patterns aloft, to the Aurora Borealis, to the earth's magnetic field.
Yet, even with all this activity, Arvildsun knew that the four engines of the Royal Norwegian Air Force C-130, approaching from the west on the Atlantic air current, would arouse interest as it passed over the town in the dead of night. He hoped that the plane—and its contents—would be far away before anyone came to the base to make inquiries.
The large propeller-driven aircraft touched down and taxied the last two hundred meters of its trip from Scotland on packed snow and ice that had yet to be scraped from the tarmac. After coming to a stop near the austere terminal, the pilot shut down three of the engines, leaving one running to keep the fuel, hydraulic fluid, oil—and the aircraft's cabin—heated.