Sheik Meshal, as the ISIS project leader, explained the situation. “The turning point for the Assad regime is the battle for Aleppo. With renewed support from Iran and Russia, the Syrian government has been on the offense for the past thirty days and has made the recapture of Aleppo a major objective. The major reason why Syria can concentrate on the anti-Assad rebel forces in Aleppo is because the pressure they were getting from Daesh has all but ceased. The Kurds are defeating Daesh. Daesh has lost more than twenty-five percent of its territory. Once the Syrian government seizes Aleppo, the ISIS-held territories in the northeast of Syrian, including Raqqa, will be between the twin vises of the Syrian government and the Kurds. Our plan of utilizing Daesh to destroy the Iranian puppet, Assad, and then allowing the Western coalition to destroy Daesh is failing. The Western-backed Kurds are having too much success against Daesh in northern Iraq and Syria.”
Sheik Rasheed from the UAE asked, “How can we get the Daesh forces to press the attack against Assad’s forces?”
Sheik Meshal answered, “We must first relieve the pressure Daesh is receiving from the Kurds.”
“How can we go about that?” asked Sheik Rasheed.
Prince Bandar jumped in. “We’ve made overtures to President Erdogan in Turkey, and he’s responded with targeted attacks against Kurdish military forces along the border. This has helped, but it’s not enough. I suggest our next step should be to reduce the flow of weapons and ammunition to the Kurdish forces. Most of that supply flow is coming from the US and is traveling through UAE; together, we need to make every effort to disrupt it.”
Sheik Meshal added, “A combination of forcing the Kurds to defend against the Turkish incursions from the north and slowing the weapons flow will reduce Kurdish pressure on Daesh, which, inshallah, will allow Daesh to concentrate on Assad’s forces. I will take the lead on disrupting the Peshmerga supply chain.”
Chapter 14
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Pat woke at four in the morning in the owner’s cabin of the Sam Houston. He turned on the TV. With the help of Apple TV, a satellite link and an MLB.TV subscription, he tuned into the fourth inning of the Red Sox game. The owner’s cabin was plush by any standard. It had a queen bed, a bathroom complete with bathtub and shower, a sitting area, and a work desk. A fifty-inch TV was mounted on the wall opposite the bed, and with the satellite system, Pat could get Internet and TV from anyplace in the world. Between the six and seventh innings, with the Sox leading 4-3 against Tampa, Pat went upstairs and made coffee for himself and the crew.
As dawn broke, Pat was disconnecting the power cable from the dock station while Mia did the same with the water connection. Once everything was disconnected and stowed, Pat went on a walk-around of the boat, going through a mental list of preoperational checks. Pat was still new enough at boating that he used checklists. The first step was the engine room.
The twin Caterpillar C18 1150-horsepower engines were still shiny and clean and capable of powering the seventy-thousand-pound yacht up to thirty-five knots. Pat had had the boat modified to store an additional two thousand gallons of diesel fuel by placing collapsible tanks in the unused crew quarters. The girls used one of the visitor staterooms instead of the cramped crew quarters below the stern deck. With the modification, the boat had a cruising range of nineteen hundred miles, which meant if he planned his refueling stops correctly, he could circle the planet. The composite boat had a CE-A rated, which allowed it to handle any sea conditions, it was a blue water boat.
After the walk-through, Pat untied the lines and climbed up the stairs to the flybridge. The boat could be controlled from either the helm station on the flybridge or from the one in the wheelhouse on the main deck. The bow and stern thrusters made it possible for the boat to move in any direction using a joystick control. Maneuvering the boat from the slip out onto the open water through the tight confines of the marina was extremely easy. The boat had two gyro stabilizers, which kept the decks level and flat under most conditions. All of the Raymarine controls on the flybridge and in the wheelhouse were fully digital. The boat had a state-of-the-art navigation system, radar, and depth finder that were fully automated. It was almost impossible to crash, even for a rookie mariner such as Pat. He was still infatuated with his boat. At heart, he was still a poor kid from the projects in South Boston and now that he had some financial independence for the first time in his life, he was ready to ditch his day-to-day job and cruise the world.
Pat’s plan for the next two days was to cruise from Abu Dhabi to Sohar, Oman. The fishing in Oman was some of the best in the world, and September was the beginning of the peak season. Their route will take them 150 miles due north, along the west coast of Arabia and then through the Strait of Hormuz, followed by another 150 miles due south down along the eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. The trip would take ten hours, which would afford them a few hours of fishing on the first day. They’d fish again from Sunday morning until the early afternoon and then start the trip back, getting them into Abu Dhabi late Sunday night.
It was a beautiful day for a boat trip. Pat was wearing a pair of Tommy Bahama khaki shorts, a white PDF shirt, Oakley sunglasses, a Boston Red Sox hat and Sperry boat shoes, because he was a white middle-aged guy and that was the law. Jenny Lyn was in a pair of black shorts, a loose white T-shirt with BEBE stenciled on the front, and flip-flops. She was in the salon, avoiding the sun like a vampire because she was terrified of darkening her skin. Mia, whose clothing style was every mother’s worst nightmare, was wearing jean shorts cut off so high that the pockets were four inches below the denim, a loose pink tank top, braless of course, and no shoes. Pat was sitting behind the controls at the flybridge helm station with the wind at his face, cruising at twenty-eight knots with mild seas, feeling rather good about life. He needed to do this more often.
At around ten o’clock, the traffic became heavy as they neared the Strait of Hormuz and the sea lanes narrowed. At its narrowest, the strait was fifty kilometers wide, with Iran to the north and the tip of Arabia to the south. Most of the oil from the Middle East passed through this strait.
Pat tried to maintain twenty-eight knots as he threaded the Sam Houston around the giant slow-moving oil tankers. He was keeping track of all the ships around him using the MARPA (mini-automatic radar plotting aid) on the Raymarine Quantum Radar display. A feature allows him to tag every hazard and every craft, displaying range, heading, and speed for each. Because of the amount of traffic and clutter, he had the radar dialed down to display a range of only twenty kilometers.
Once the Sam Houston passed the peak of Ras Musandam, Pat steered the boat south and west out of the major sea lane and away from all other traffic and set the autopilot on a heading due south toward the UAE coastal city of Fujairah.
He was about to turn the controls over to Jenny Lyn when he heard a chirp on the radar alarm. He glanced down at the screen and saw three boat icons approaching from behind. They were nineteen kilometers back and moving fast in a column formation. The system tagged each boat at a speed of forty-five knots. Pat throttled the twin engines up to full and turned the boat westward to get closer to Omani waters. He was guessing it was a harassing patrol from the Iranian Navy, and his movement close to the Oman coast would hopefully be enough for them to leave him alone.
The icon on Pat’s radar screen changed heading to an intercept course, which caused him to worry. He divided his time over the next few minutes between watching the radar screen and checking the nav system to see how close they were to Oman. Several minutes later, he was three miles from the Omani shoreline and they were still pursuing him. He grabbed the two wireless headsets they used to talk when docking from under the console and handed one to Jenny Lyn, telling her to close to within a mile of the shore and to then head south.
He jumped over Jenny Lyn and ran down both sets of stairs to the owners’ cabin, unlocking the hidden storage area under his bed. He pulled out a heavy black nylon bag that was two yards long and weighed
over a hundred pounds. Throwing the strap of the heavy bag over his shoulder, Pat headed back up the stairs to the main deck. The bag made a loud thump when it dropped onto the stern deck.
Pat was breathing hard when he unzipped the bag with his sweaty fingers. He pulled out a pair of Steiner 7x50 Marine Commander XP binoculars and braced himself against the stern entryway before bringing the lead chase boat into focus.
“Jenny Lyn, what’s the distance and speed on the radar to the closest boat?” Pat asked over his radio set. He was trying to find a flag or other identifier on the lead boat, but even with the binoculars, it was too difficult to make out any details.
Instead of Jenny Lyn, it was Mia who replied in a nervous voice, “Four thousand, five hundred and sixty meters, speed fifty-three knots.”
That was close enough for him. Pat reached back into the bag and pulled out a case containing a Barrett M107 semiautomatic .50-caliber sniper rifle. He extracted the weapon from its soft case, extended the bipod, and set the weapon onto the open gangway. He flipped off the protective caps from the Leopold Mark IV scope and took four ten-round magazines of GD Sniper Elite red-tipped armor-piercing incendiary rounds from the bag, placing them next to the weapon.
Taking a couple of steps back, Pat dropped to his knees and slid into a prone position behind the Barrett gun. He slid a magazine into the well and chambered a round. Looking through the sixteen-by-forty mildot scope, he could clearly identify the first two boats. They were Iranian fast-attack boats, flying the Iranian flag. Memorizing specs to military equipment was his job. These were forty-one feet long, unarmored and capable of speeds of sixty knots. These boats had a crew of three and were armed with 107mm rocket launchers and a 12.7mm machine gun. At this speed, Pat wasn’t worried about the rocket launchers—it would be impossible to aim them properly—but the sailors manning each of the DShk machine guns were a different story.
“Mia, what’s the total number of boats and the range?” he asked.
“Range is two thousand, four hundred and fifty meters, and the number of boats is still three.”
“Count down every five hundred meters.”
“Okay.”
They were in sight of the shoreline, and it didn’t look like the Omani Navy was going to come to the rescue. Pat was still not completely sure if this was just the Iranians playing games and harassing him or if they had violent intentions, so he held his fire.
“Two thousand,” Mia says.
Pat kept his cheek to the stock and reached on top of the Leopold scope, dialing in a range of twelve hundred meters. He put his finger on the windage knob to make an adjustment but thought better of it and left it at zero. He kept the weapon trained on the DShk gunner of the lead boat.
“Fifteen hundred,” Mia said.
Pat could see the muzzle flash from the DShk 12.7mm machine gun as it opened fire. He gently pulled the trigger as the crack of the rounds zipping high over the port side reached his ears. Moving at fifty knots in a forty-one-foot boat even in mild seas was a very rough ride, and it was hard to hit anything from an unstabilized platform. He was moving at thirty-five knots in a much bigger boat, and Pat had the advantage of two Seakeeper gyrostabilizer systems that were keeping the luxury yacht steady enough to bowl on.
When Pat saw the muzzle flash, he didn’t have time to make any further adjustment on the range, He adjusted his aim a little lower and fired the first round at the sailor manning the 12.7mm DShk. The body armor the sailor was wearing did him no good as the round punched right through his chest. Pat rapid-fired the remaining nine rounds into the wheelhouse and hull of the boat, then switched magazines and turned his attention to the machine gunner in the second boat. The gunner was wildly returning fire and Pat could hear impacts behind him. It took him three rounds before he saw the gunner’s head disappear in a red mist.
Then Pat shifted fire to the machine gunner in the third boat, which was coming evenly abreast and passing the second boat. Pat got lucky and dropping the third boat’s gunner with a single chest shot. He emptied the remainder of the magazine into the wheelhouse and hull of boat three and watched it erupt in flames. The only boat still pursuing them at that point was the second. Pat inserted another magazine, but before he could do any damage, the boat did a quick one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Boat two was quickly out of range, while the first and third boats were burning.
“Reduce speed to ten knots,” Pat said to Mia. He jumped up from the prone position and went back into his black bag. This time he pulled out a two-foot-long rectangular box. He extended the attached legs and set the box at a forty-five-degree angle upward. He removed the cap on the top and reached for the ground control station inside his bag. The AerEnvironment Switchblade is a kamikaze UAV that has a range of ten kilometers and the explosive equivalent of a 40mm high-explosive grenade.
Pat powered up the ground controller and launched the UAV. Within minutes, the UAV was over the second boat. Through the video feed, he could see sailors pulling a survivor from one of the other boats onto the deck. He hit the safe-to-arm button on the controller and began the attack. The Switchblade dived down at a forty-five-degree angle from five hundred feet above the water. As the Switchblade descended, he could see on his controller video screen the picture from the video camera in the nose of the UAV. A sailor on the deck looked up and pointed directly at the camera.
Pat aimed the UAV at the rear of the vessel, where he knew he would find the fuel tank. The picture on the controller went black, and seconds later, Pat heard an explosion. Looking up at the horizon, he could see three columns of black smoke. He tossed the dispensable UAV launcher overboard, stowed the rifle and UAV controller and placed everything back into the bag, returning it to its original hiding space.
When he made his way to the wheelhouse, Pat found Mia ashen-faced, sitting behind the controls.
“Where’s Jenny Lyn?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Mia.
“Can you go find her and make sure she’s all right? I’m going to get us back on course,” he said.
Pat put the autopilot on a heading toward Fujairah and set the speed at eighteen knots. He was just about to do a walk-around tour of the yacht to check for damage when he heard a scream.
He found Mia in the narrow walkway on the portside of the main deck. When he reached her, she was kneeling over Jenny Lyn’s lifeless body. He could tell it was no use going for the first aid kit. Jenny Lyn’s tiny frame had been hit in the upper torso with a 12.7mm bullet, and most of her chest was missing. Pat couldn’t imagine why she would have been at this spot, and there was no way he was ever going to find out. He knelt down beside Jenny Lyn and, just to be sure, checked for a pulse. He closed her lifeless eyes and brushed the hair away from her face, looking over at Mia, who was holding on to the side of the yacht, trembling, with tears running down her face. Pat couldn’t remember ever feeling so bad about anything. He carried Jenny Lyn’s body to the stern deck and covered her with a blanket.
The trip to the marina in Fujairah took over an hour. Pat spent some of that time on his laptop. Mia was silent the entire time. He called the marina and was unable to get a slip because they were all full, so he anchored a few hundred meters offshore. Once they were anchored, Pat told Mia to pack. The woman was still in shock and was following orders robotically.
Mia finally spoke. “Are we going to jail? What’s going to happen?”
“Going to jail is not a worry; your safety is. Being near me right now is dangerous. A driver will be here momentarily. I’ve booked the next Emirates flight leaving from Dubai to Manila. I’ll transfer enough money into your account so that you can remain in the Philippines for a long time, forever if need be.” While Pat talked, he was printing the boarding pass from his laptop.
“What about Jenny Lyn?” asked Mia.
“I’ll make sure her remains get back to her home in the Philippines, and I’ll take care of her family. I’m sorry. I had no idea this was going to happen. Finis
h packing, and don’t forget your passport. The driver will be here shortly. I’ll prep the tender and take you to the dock once he arrives. You’ll go directly to Terminal 3. Stay in the business class lounge until they call your flight. Don’t leave the Philippines unless I call you and tell you it’s safe.”
Pat went to the stern of the boat and removed the cover from the Williams Turbojet 325 tender that was perched on the hydraulic platform at the tail end of the boat. While he was working on the tender, he felt a stabbing pain as he glanced up at the gray blanket covering Jenny Lyn’s body. While he was waiting for Mia to bring up her luggage, Pat called Mike Guthrie on his iPhone. It was a little after one o’clock in the afternoon in UAE, which meant on the East Coast, it was five in the morning. Pat had an app on his government-issued iPhone that allowed for secure encrypted voice communication. It was not something he’d ever used before, because nothing drew attention from the UAE government like an encrypted phone call, but this was a special situation. Mike picked up on the third ring and said hello a few seconds later after activating the secure function.
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