The Persian Gamble

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  The price had been steep. Nick Vinetti was dead. His wife, Claire, was now a widow. Pete Hwang had almost been killed and was out of commission, recovering in a field hospital in Okinawa. Ryker was practically alone in the world. His wife was dead. His son was dead. The man himself had almost died time and time again over the past month. Yet he refused to give up, even when McDermott had given up on him.

  McDermott was not a particularly religious man, though he had been an altar boy growing up. Yet right there in the Situation Room, he found himself discreetly crossing himself and saying a prayer for his friend and all the men heading into the night.

  85

  Twenty miles from their drop zone, a C-17 emerged from the darkness.

  The American military transport plane had been dispatched from Okinawa. It now dropped to five thousand feet and opened its massive rear cargo ramp. Marcus switched on his night vision goggles just in time to see two thirty-six-foot RHIBs—rigid-hulled inflatable boats—slip out the back.

  The moment their parachutes opened—four per boat—Marcus turned to his left and watched Donny Callaghan and his Red Team jump from a nearby chopper. They pulled their chutes open almost immediately and quickly vanished in the utter darkness. Marcus turned off his night vision goggles. There was no way he’d be able to see anything in these conditions from this altitude. He closed his eyes and imagined the men hitting the waters of the East China Sea. Minutes later, Callaghan radioed back to say they were all on board the speedboats and racing for the target.

  Unlike the Indonesian ship they’d boarded, this tanker was not idling. Far from it. The vessel was moving at close to twenty-four knots, almost twenty-seven miles per hour. Marcus continued listening to the radio traffic and pictured Callaghan and his team attaching ladders to the sides of the ship and scaling them with breathtaking rapidity. They would not be able to attach mines to the propeller, of course, as it was churning at full speed. But eventually the call they’d been waiting for finally came. Callaghan confirmed they’d reached and secured the engine room and cut the ship’s power, encountering no resistance.

  What did that mean? wondered Marcus. No resistance? How was that possible? Did they have the wrong ship again, or were they being lured into a trap?

  With the ship now dark and dead in the water, the full assault could begin. Sanchez ordered the pilots to pick up the pace. Soon the Seahawk moved into a hovering position barely fifty feet over a helicopter landing zone painted like a red bull’s-eye on the tanker’s port bow.

  “Go, go, go,” Sanchez shouted, slapping his men on the back as they began fast-roping to the deck.

  Marcus was the last in line, aside from Sanchez himself. When it was his turn, he moved to the door and heard gunfire erupt and saw tracer rounds streaking through the air. Rounds began hitting the side of the chopper. It was the right ship. There was no doubt about that now.

  The gunner behind them returned fire with his .50-caliber mounted machine gun. Sanchez slapped Marcus on the back and screamed at him to get moving.

  It had been years since he’d done this in the Corps, but muscle memory and a healthy shot of adrenaline kicked in. Marcus grabbed the rope and dropped through the darkness. The moment his feet hit the deck, he raised his MP7A1 and moved to his right. There was a gap between two massive steel pipes on the starboard side, where he took cover and tried to get his bearings as the deck lurched from side to side in the roiling waves.

  The ship’s enormous size was daunting. It spanned the length of three football fields from bow to stern and was sixty meters wide. Two sets of large black metal pipelines—elevated by rusty steel columns and girders—ran down the center, nearly the full length of the deck. Toward the front of the ship was a steel mast sprouting all manner of radio antennas and deck lights. Nearby were two windlasses, the mechanisms responsible for raising and lowering the massive anchor chains. Near the ship’s center were two steel cranes, port and starboard, capable of lifting the heavy hoses used to load and unload oil, as well as move containers of supplies and other heavy equipment.

  Toward the rear of the ship stood a five-story superstructure topped with radar masts and more radio antennas. Behind that was the engine housing with its massive smokestack that had been billowing black acrid filth until the SEALs had arrived and shut the engines down. There were also four lifeboats, two on each side, all once painted orange, though most of that had chipped off or faded with time. Around the edges of the ship were mooring lines, towropes, bollards, winches, and an array of forklifts and other equipment lashed to the decks with chains.

  And now it began to rain. Hard. Marcus could see flashes of lightning to the north. The storm they’d been told would hold off for a few more hours had not only arrived, it was gaining strength. A Saudi flag mounted on a steel pole near the bow was whipping something fierce. In such rapidly deteriorating conditions, it was no surprise that there were no guards patrolling the deck. The gunfire, instead, was coming from the now-darkened windows of the superstructure.

  As soon as Sanchez dropped to the deck, he made his way to Marcus’s side. Then their chopper roared off, disappearing into the night, quickly replaced by another.

  “Follow me!” Sanchez shouted, unleashing a burst of covering fire before sprinting for the pipelines running down the center of the ship, heading toward the stern.

  Though rounds were pinging all around him, Marcus popped his head around the corner and fired two long bursts—one at the muzzle flashes coming from the second floor of the superstructure, the other at flashes coming from the third floor. Then he raced to catch up with Sanchez.

  Just then, a massive explosion shook the giant ship. An enormous fireball lit up the night sky. The force of the blast knocked both Sanchez and Marcus off their feet. Sanchez recovered and scrambled for cover behind one of the steel cranes. Marcus did the same, a tick slower, turning just in time to see one of the choppers falling from the sky and engulfing the deck in flames.

  Sanchez was yelling something. Marcus couldn’t hear him over the roar of the fire, the .50-caliber machine guns being fired from the remaining choppers, and the screams of the SEALs the burning Seahawk had landed on. He assumed someone had just fired an RPG but could see no contrail. He also assumed Sanchez would head back to the crash to rescue whatever survivors they could find. Yet Sanchez instead furiously motioned Marcus to follow him in the other direction.

  Confused, Marcus nevertheless complied. Sanchez was making for the superstructure, and nothing but death was going to stop him. Marcus saw the commander pivot around the left side of the crane. The man fired two long bursts, ejected his spent magazine, reloaded, and then doubled back around the right side and disappeared. Everything in Marcus wanted to go the other direction, to fight his way back to the crash. But that was not his call.

  During their briefings, Sanchez had explained Blue Team’s mission clearly: secure every level of the superstructure, from the galley and cafeteria to the crew’s bunks and radio room to the all-important pilothouse on the bridge. Nothing else mattered until that was done. Others would have to care for the wounded. It was not Marcus’s right to second-guess his commander. So he followed suit, firing two more bursts to the left, reloading, and rolling right.

  86

  Marcus almost tripped over Sanchez’s body.

  For a split second, he froze, unable and unwilling to comprehend the sight before him. It simply wasn’t possible. There was no way Sanchez could have been taken out already. They’d just landed. They’d just—

  Marcus saw movement to his right, about thirty yards away. Someone was emerging from a hatch mid-deck. He immediately pivoted and opened fire. The tango’s head exploded, and his body snapped back into the hatch and dropped out of sight. Instantly Marcus saw more muzzle flashes, this time from the fourth floor of the superstructure. Fifty-caliber rounds were ripping up the deck all around him. To press forward was suicide, so Marcus beat a hasty retreat behind the crane. It was not much cover, but it would have t
o do. He tried to make himself as small a target as possible and radioed for help.

  As he did, he looked toward the front of the ship. It was an incomprehensible sight. To his left was the raging inferno of the downed Seahawk. To his right, the deck was strewn with bodies. Some were moving. Most were not. And that’s when it occurred to Marcus that he might have been the only person from his chopper who had not been wounded or killed.

  Suddenly he heard the hiss of a rocket-propelled grenade streaking across the sky. It came from behind him, then zoomed over his head. Transfixed, he followed its path and watched as one of the pilots turned his bird sharply. Marcus breathed a sigh of relief as the RPG disappeared into the night and fell harmlessly into the sea.

  Then came a second rocket and a third. This time the pilot had no chance. Both RPGs hit their target. The Seahawk—not a hundred feet off the deck and in the process of offloading its men—burst into flames. Half of it came crashing onto the front-right section of the ship’s bow. The tail section plunged into the sea. Then came additional explosions as the ordnance on board cooked off one by one.

  Marcus could feel the searing heat. The repeated booms knocked him off balance. He momentarily dropped his weapon as he instinctively covered his head and face with his arms. When he looked back up, the apocalyptic scene had grown much worse. The rest of the choppers were backing away. They were still firing at the bridge, and not just with .50-caliber machine guns but with air-to-ground Hellfire missiles. But there was no question they were retreating.

  Who could blame them? There was no longer any safe place to land. But what exactly did that mean for the rest of the operation?

  Marcus was on his stomach now, flattened on the lurching, blazing deck. He reached for his MP7 and pulled it close. Then he turned and saw the flaming wreckage of the bridge. The Hellfire missiles had taken out the fourth and fifth stories. They were gone. Completely gone. The second and third stories were consumed in fire and billowing black smoke. He could barely believe what he was seeing. None of this had been part of the plan. The operating assumption was that al-Zanjani would be on the bridge, likely on the fifth level. Weren’t they supposed to take him alive? Hadn’t that been the president’s explicit order?

  His mind reeled. He could tell people were talking over the radio, but it was impossible to hear clearly over the cacophony around him. Then he remembered the warheads. They still had to be secured and safely removed from the tanker. That meant clearing the lower decks of every remaining member of the Revolutionary Guards. But who was going to do it? Looking back, Marcus could see only three SEALs on their feet, pulling their wounded comrades away from the flames.

  Still, there was Callaghan and Red Team, Marcus thought. They were already down below, having taken the engine room. He had to link up with them and help them complete the mission before this ship sank to the bottom of the East China Sea. There was no question in Marcus’s mind the tanker was going down. That was an absolute certainty. There was no putting out the fires raging in the destroyed superstructure and on the deck. This was an oil tanker. It was only a matter of time before the flames reached some crucial spot and caused a massive explosion that would blow out the hull. The only question was how long they still had.

  For the moment, no one was shooting. If he was going to make a break for it, Marcus thought, the time was now. Through the smoke, he could see a steel door on the left side of the first floor of the superstructure. Remembering the briefing and the satellite photos they’d been shown, he was confident that particular hatch led to a stairwell that would take him to the ship’s lower levels. This became his new target.

  Scrambling to his feet, Marcus decided to use the cover of the pipes running down the center of the deck. He rechecked his weapon to make sure it hadn’t jammed, then sprinted forward. He’d made it about fifty yards without getting killed when he saw another hatch open and two tangos climb out. Faster on the draw, they began shooting first, but Marcus immediately returned fire. Two short bursts, then two more. Both men dropped to the rain-swept deck. Marcus kept sprinting and firing until he was convinced they were never going to rise again.

  Reloading on the run, Marcus saw movement in one of the blown-out first-floor windows. Whoever it was began firing at him. He couldn’t see a face, only the muzzle flashes. But he didn’t dare stop. He couldn’t. There was no place to hide and precious little time until whatever oil was stored in the tanks below him was going to blow. He raised his MP7 and fired more short bursts. Five rounds. Then another five. Then a third. He didn’t expect to kill whoever was in there. He just needed to keep them pinned down for another twenty seconds until he reached his target.

  It almost worked.

  McDermott sat spellbound by the ghastly images.

  The attack was not going as planned. It had become a horror show, and now, as he watched real-time drone coverage, he saw Ryker racing for cover. Just then, he also saw two shadows emerge from the port side door of the bridge. They raised their weapons and McDermott saw two muzzle flashes.

  He watched helplessly as Ryker spun around and went sprawling across the deck. He’d been hit. That much was clear. How badly, neither McDermott nor anyone around him could say. But they watched in shock as the two figures moved across their screen from right to left. They were closing in on Ryker, who had dropped his weapon and was crawling to get it back. One of the figures raised his own weapon. He was aiming, about to fire. McDermott couldn’t bear to watch yet couldn’t turn away.

  He saw muzzle flashes from the left side of the screen. One of the tangos dropped, followed in quick succession by the other. They were down but still moving. But after two more flashes they moved no more. McDermott then saw a figure emerge out of the metal door Ryker had been approaching, followed by another figure, and together they pulled Ryker to his feet.

  87

  “Ryker—you okay?” someone shouted as he grabbed Marcus’s hand.

  It was Callaghan, flanked by another SEAL, one of the medics. Marcus remembered him being introduced as Warner.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Marcus shouted back over the roar of the flames, still trying to catch his breath. “I was just coming to find you guys.”

  “Consider us found.”

  “I owe you,” Marcus added, staring at the bullet-riddled bodies beside him.

  “No problem. You sure you’re good? Looks like you got clipped pretty hard.”

  “Both rounds hit my flak jacket,” Marcus replied. “Knocked the wind out of me, but yeah, I’m good.”

  “What a mess out here.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Where’s Sanchez? Can’t get him on the radio.”

  “He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Dead.”

  “How?”

  “I think a sniper took him out.”

  “Where’s the rest of Blue Team?”

  “Haven’t seen any of them. They may all be dead.”

  “You’re the only one who survived?”

  “I saw three guys from another squad. They were looking for wounded from the first crashed chopper. I wanted to help them. But they were at least a hundred yards away, and Sanchez insisted we make for the bridge. That’s when he got hit. I called in some help against the fifties they were using from the bridge. Can’t say I expected them to use Hellfires.”

  “Me neither,” Callaghan said. “The explosions were so massive, Warner and I had to come up and see what in the world was going on, especially when we couldn’t get anyone on the radios.” He nodded toward the flaming wreckage of the superstructure. “Anyone still in there?”

  “Can’t say,” Marcus said. “I just took out one, but there could be more.”

  “Clear it, both of you; then meet me back here,” Callaghan ordered. “I need to get someone on the horn and let them know exactly what’s going on.”

  Callaghan pulled out a satphone and found a covered position under one of the lifeboats. Marcus hoisted his weap
on and moved to a weathertight door a few yards away from the stairway door Callaghan and Warner had emerged from. Warner was right behind him. When they’d both put on their NVGs, Marcus yanked open the heavy steel door just enough for Warner to toss in a grenade, then closed it rapidly and ducked down.

  The moment they heard the detonation, Marcus pulled the door open again and sprayed the room with a full magazine. Warner stepped inside, scanning for targets as Marcus reloaded and came in behind him. Warner moved right. Marcus moved to the left, sweeping his MP7A1 from side to side, covering the other half of the spacious but filthy cafeteria.

  “Clear!” Warner shouted.

  Marcus cautiously entered the galley, checking every crevice where a man could be hiding, including the walk-in refrigerator. “Clear!” he finally shouted, reminding himself to keep taking deep breaths.

  Warner moved from the cafeteria into the lounge and then the incinerator room. When he had cleared both, they reconvened in a small hallway and went to the stairwell leading to the second floor. As best they could figure, this was where the crew’s sleeping quarters were located.

  Marcus headed up first. Warner followed but climbed the stairs backward, making certain no one surprised them from behind. Not only was the stairwell pitch-black, it was rapidly filling with smoke. And it was ghastly hot. Quite apart from the driving rains outside, Marcus could feel his whole body now dripping with sweat.

  When he reached the landing, Marcus pressed himself flat against the wall, then glanced through the smudged window in the door to see if anyone was waiting for them in the hallway on the other side. Someone was. The shooting began immediately. Marcus pulled back into the safety of the landing as round after round splintered the wooden door. Then he heard something metal rolling down the hallway toward them.