He walked the short distance from his SUV to the rear wall and extended the ladder between two cameras, compressing the concertina between two hold points. He secured the ladder while matting the concertina and climbed over the fence. Once on top, he stood on the wire, reversed the ladder, and climbed down. Then he retrieved the ladder, collapsed it and walked to a covered position behind some trees with a good view of the front gate.
At a little past midnight, Pat was kneeling behind a tree as he watched a convoy of vehicles pull up to the front gate. The driver of the first vehicle rolled his window down and the metal barrier descended. Through the thermal imager, Pat tried to do a headcount, but he couldn’t see through the window glass.
When the vehicles reached the main building, the first and third vehicles kept going, and the second stopped in front of the main entryway. While the two men in the front of the Nissan opened the back door on the building side, Pat stayed in the shadows and slowly walked to the back of the SUV. The two men were preoccupied with helping the prisoner, who was in handcuffs and struggling to exit the truck.
Once the prisoner was out and standing, Pat stepped around the truck and delivered a hard-right openhanded strike to the back of the first intelligence officer’s head, knocking him down. The strike made a loud clap, which caused the second security officer to spin his head in Pat’s direction. Pat hit him with a left jab to the nose and a right uppercut to the jaw that sent him to the ground. He then grabbed the prisoner by the neck, pushed him into the backseat and closed the door on the still-running truck. He got into the driver’s seat and drove toward the exit. The security guard couldn’t see him behind the darkly tinted window of the Nissan, so he lowered the metal barrier, allowing Pat to drive onto the main road.
When he pulled up behind his Explorer on Al Falah Street, the prisoner was still lying flat along the backseat of the Nissan. The terrified skinny young man with a wispy beard, wearing only his white kandora and sandals, didn’t say a word when Pat opened the rear door, grabbed him by the collar and dragged him into the backseat of the Explorer.
Pat left the Nissan and headed to the marina. When he reached it, he parked as close as he could get to his boat slip. The parking lot for the marina also served as a parking lot for a popular fish restaurant, which was just starting to close, and Pat had to wait for a couple of diners to drive away. He opened the tail gate and strapped the heavy go-bag around his shoulders; then he opened the rear side door to get the prisoner.
No sooner did Pat have the door open than the prisoner began to scream, sounding like a young girl on a roller coaster. Pat dragged him out by his feet and lifted him to a standing position with his right hand tight around his throat. The prisoner stopped screaming. Pat put him in a headlock and dragged the 140-pound kid onto the boat. He dropped the prisoner on the back deck, flex-cuffed his legs, and then dragged him through the salon into the wheelhouse. He untied the boat lines, disconnected the power, and stowed the cables. Once everything was in working order, he started the engines and sailed due north into the darkness toward the middle of the Gulf of Arabia.
The nav system showed they were twenty kilometers offshore. The radar didn’t show any boats nearby. Pat stopped the boat and let them drift. He grabbed the prisoner and dragged him back through the salon doors out onto the stern deck, sitting him on the back couch. Despite having been together for almost two hours, they had yet to speak a word to each other.
Pat broke the ice.
“There are two possibilities for how this night is going to work out for you. The first possibility is, you tell me what I want to know, and I’ll return you to Abu Dhabi alive. The second possibility is, you don’t honestly answer my questions, and you don’t return to Abu Dhabi alive.”
Pat hit the prisoner with a quick jab to the nose and went downstairs to get his video camera. Once he had the video camera set up and the overhead deck lighting on, he told the prisoner, who had a trickle of blood flowing out of his nose, to begin.
“What do you want from me?” the man pleaded.
“Start with your name and then tell me your story.”
The prisoner didn’t say anything, so Pat went into the galley and returned with a large knife. He glared at the prisoner with the quiet resignation of someone who would carry out his threat if he didn’t start talking, then turned on the video camera and said, “Go.”
“My name is Mansour Al Sadiki. I work for NESA as a senior analyst. I was detained by national security by mistake.”
Pat walked over to the back of the boat. He took the end of one of the tie-down lines, tied a single bowline knot around Mansour’s waist and tossed him overboard. With cuffs on his hands and flex-cuffs on his feet, Mansour sank like a rock. After fifteen seconds, Pat began to retrieve the line and pulled him up onto the hydraulic platform next to the tender. Mansour took a couple of minutes to catch his breath.
“Are you ready to try again, or do you want to go for another swim?”
Mansour nodded, and Pat put him back in the chair. He turned the video camera back on.
“Why were you arrested?”
“I accessed files I was not supposed to access.”
“What were the files?”
“They were your files, audio and data files from you and your associates.”
“Who am I?”
“You’re Pat Walsh.”
“Who were my associates?”
“I don’t remember the names. They were Filipina girls.”
“Who told you to access my files?”
He didn’t answer right away. Pat waited. After a minute went by without a response, he picked Mansour up from the front by the armpits and threw him into the ocean backward. This time he waited thirty seconds before reeling him in.
“Are you ready to continue?” he asked.
“His Highness Sheik Rasheed asked me to copy your file and relay it on two occasions, and that’s all I did. I didn’t do anything wrong. I can’t say no to a Highness.”
“If you had said no to a Highness, three people would still be alive right now. Your actions killed two men and an innocent woman.”
Pat spent the next hour going over the details of how Sheik Rasheed had communicated with Mansour and how he’d accessed and relayed the information. When he was done, Pat set course for Sir Banyas Island. Barely an hour later, he put a life preserver around Mansour, cut the plastic flex-ties on his feet, uncuffed his hands and pushed him overboard. They were less than one hundred and fifty yards offshore from the luxurious Anantara Beach resort on the exotic island.
Pat turned the boat around and set the heading toward Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi had many coastal islands, and he threaded his way through them in the dark using the advanced Raymarine radar and navigation system and forward-looking infrared (FLIR) at maximum cruising speed. His next destination was Al Hudayriat Island, which was a deserted man-made expanse less than seven hundred meters from the most expensive gated community in the world, Al Muzoon.
Al Muzoon was a man-made island connected to Abu Dhabi proper by a very narrow land bridge that had a heavily guarded gate. The area was one kilometer wide and four kilometers long and housed a dozen palaces owned by members of the royal family and a few select billionaires. Mansour was a member of Sheik Rasheed’s majlis and, having visited his palace many times, he had been able to provide Pat with accurate details on the palace layout and where he could find the sheik.
Pat anchored the boat in ten feet of water off on the far side of Al Hudayriat Island and geared up for his next task. It was three o’clock in the morning, and the moon was full. He wore a black 0.5mm Body Glove titanium shirt and pants and black sportive climbing shoes. He armed himself with a SIG P226 pistol and a diver’s knife and shoved a pistol, tape, Taser, flex-ties, three locking carabiners, fifty feet of 9mm kernmantle static rope, and some tubular nylon strips into a fanny pack. Finally, he put on a climbing harness he’d purchased for a rock-climbing trip he’d never gotten around to taking.
He took the tender through a narrow canal that bisected Al Hudayriat Island, landing the small rigid inflatable on the rock boundary outside of Sheik Rasheed’s palace. The moment of truth was rapidly approaching. He disembarked from the tender and hopped the short property boundary wall. He was betting that the alarm would not yet have been sounded. The element of surprise depended on the national security directorate not yet having debriefed Mansour. He estimated it would take a few hours for Mansour to get back into the government’s hands, and he didn’t expect Mansour would be forthcoming with his next set of interrogators regarding the information he’d provided Pat about Sheik Rasheed’s security.
Pat’s impromptu plan was based on speed. Without the alarm being sounded by Mansour, he expected security to be very poor. The UAE government and its royal family are loved by its residents—not just the one million or so citizens, but the seven million or so foreign expatriates who also live in UAE. The threat of harm by the population is so low that security is lax.
As he began the climb up to the third-floor balcony, Pat was relieved to discover the ornately designed stone walls of the huge palace had an abundance of handholds and footholds. He began the ascent at the edge of the outer wall that faced the water, peering onto the balcony before pulling himself over the rail. Once on the balcony, Pat went to the door and turned the knob. It was unlocked, so he walked straight in.
The bedroom was enormous, and in the dark, he had some difficulty finding the bed. As he approached, he noticed two sleeping bodies. He rotated his fanny pack to the front of his waist and removed the small roll of duct tape, which he had precut into three six-inch strips. He withdrew the Taser M26 and four flex-cuffs and walked up to the bed. He quickly threw off the covers and touched the Taser against the midsection of the bigger shape, pulling the trigger and holding it, putting his left hand over the mouth of the female, who was trying to scream.
Pat taped her mouth, rolled her around, and flex-cuffed her hands and feet. He returned to the prostrate sheik, taped his mouth, and flex-cuffed his hands behind his back and then his feet. Taking a piece of tubular nylon, Pat did a backward figure eight around his back, with the carabiner connecting the two loops between his shoulder blades. He used another tubular nylon piece to tie a field-expedient harness around the sheik’s waist, then clipped a carabiner onto the front.
Pat stood the sheik up and took a knee, allowing the sheik to rest on his back. Reaching around, he connected the carabiner on his back to the carabiner in front of the sheik’s pelvis, then used another piece of tubular nylon to cinch the sheik tight to him in the piggyback position. He used his last nylon tube to wrap around a column on the balcony and connect it with a carabiner. Finally, he looped the fifty-foot line through the carabiner and threaded the line into his figure eight descender.
Pat strained as he crawled over the balcony with the heavy sheik on his back and abseiled to the ground. At a slow run, with the sheik on his back, he crossed the open ground from the perfectly manicured lawn to the wall and then to the rocky edge of the island. When he reached the tender, he pushed the boat out into several feet of water and unclipped the sheik, dumping him into the boat.
Pushing the tender out a little farther, Pat climbed in himself and started the engine. He found the small canal opening after a couple of tries, crossed through the island, and headed out into the open water toward his yacht. After docking the tender on top of the hydraulic platform that was below the surface, he raised the platform to the height of the main deck.
Pat dragged the sheik through the salon doors and dumped him on the floor of the galley. He took the controls at the helm and headed out into international waters. In less than an hour, he was in the shipping lane, sailing southeast toward Muscat, Oman.
Pat found an oil tanker heading in the same direction and positioned the boat in the shadow behind it to mask detection by any sensors or radar coming from the direction of UAE. Ten hours later, he found himself thirty miles north of Muscat at two in the afternoon.
He stopped the engines and set the autopositioning system, so the boat wouldn’t drift. He left the helm station and went back to the galley, where he had dumped the sheik many hours earlier. The sheik was still on the floor of the galley, still gagged and bound, and he appeared to have urinated in his gray silk pajamas.
Pat walked past him to one of the couches in the salon and fell asleep. He was exhausted. When he awoke, the sun was beginning to set. He had a bowl of cereal in the galley and then went down to the master cabin, where he shaved, showered, and dressed. Returning to the sheik, Pat dragged him out to the stern deck. He retrieved his video camera and his iPad and set up for another interrogation.
Pat knotted the stern tie-down line around the sheiks waist. He didn’t have any experience interrogating prisoners, but the water treatment had worked pretty well the last time, so he figured he’d stick with it. He removed the tape on the sheik’s mouth. Before the sheik had time to speak a word, Pat pushed him into the water. After fifteen seconds, he began to pull in the line until the sheik was on the hydraulic platform, choking and spluttering.
He sat the sheik on the couch and played the video of Mansour’s confession on the iPad. He then turned on the video camera and began the interrogation. Several hours later, after much resistance and many trips into the water, not to mention grand offers of riches, threats, and pleas for mercy, Pat finally obtained a recording of the information he was after. He connected a diver’s weight belt to the exhausted sheik. The poor man was too defeated to offer even the slightest resistance as he pushed him off the platform into the depths of the Gulf of Oman.
Pat sailed another three hours into Sultan Qaboos Port in Muscat. He docked, raised the Q flag, and walked over to the customs office to officially enter Oman. Once he cleared customs and completed the perfunctory walk-through inspection of his boat, he refueled and headed south along the coast another ten kilometers to Marina Al Bustan. He paid a thirty-day docking fee, connected all the hookups, and set up a base of operations for the next phase of the operation.
Pat worked the next two hours cleaning and performing postoperation maintenance tasks. While he worked, he began to develop a plan. Once everything was shipshape, he showered and had lunch at the Blue Marlin Restaurant in the main marina building. He had a grilled kingfish that was spectacular and a Stella Artois before returning to the boat.
Back on board, he opened his laptop, connected his camera and uploaded the video from the two interrogations. Pat was not the most tech-savvy person in the world, but he was able to upload both files to a Dropbox account. He connected to the Internet and sent an e-mail to Mike Guthrie, asking him to access the files in the drop box.
Next, Pat booked a round-trip flight to Kuwait for later that evening, along with a hotel reservation at the Regency Hotel for one week. He selected the Regency because it was only about half a mile from Sheik Meshal’s palace on Nassar Al-Mubarrak Street. He was at the galley table, engrossed in map reconnaissance using Google Earth, when he felt the vibration of someone stepping onto the boat. Looking through the triple glass door from the salon to the stern deck, Pat saw a man with his hands up. He went to the doors and opened them.
The man wore a blue suit; he looked to be about thirty-five years old, with short sandy hair and a heavy muscular build. The first words out of his mouth were, “Mike Guthrie asked me to deliver a message.”
Pat asked the man to come into the salon and have a seat. He studied him. Because he’d mentioned Mike Guthrie, Pat assumed he was with the Agency, most likely working out of the embassy. The man looked athletic. He had a strong face with intelligent gray eyes, and a square jaw. Put a flat-top on him, and he could’ve been on a US Marine Corps recruiting poster.
“What’s the message?”
“Mike wants you to remain in place. He’ll be here in seventeen hours, and he doesn’t want you to leave this boat until he arrives.”
“You can tell him that I’ll stay in the marina area until he arrives. Did you bring a bag, or are you going to stay in those same clothes until Mike shows?”
The man smiled. He stood up and stuck out his hand. “The name is Walt Berg. I have instructions to stay with you until Mike arrives. I’ll try not to be a nuisance.”
“No problem, Walt. Let me know if you need anything. There are two empty cabins below. Pick one and make yourself at home. There’s food and beer in the fridge. Help yourself to anything you want.”
“Thanks,” said Walt. “If you don’t mind, I need to go back to my car to get some things and make a call.”
While Walt was gone, Pat changed his plane ticket and delayed his trip to Kuwait City by a day. He saved copies of the interrogations onto a USB drive and hid the drive in the engine room, then he went into the wine storage in the galley and selected a bottle of Patrimony 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon and decanted it. In the main salon, he activated the switch that elevated the fifty-five-inch TV from the cabinet and turned on a replay of game two of the Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs World Series game. Walt joined him a few minutes later, and for the next three hours they talked baseball and drank wine. Afterward, Pat made a salad and grilled steaks on the flydeck for dinner. Walt was good company.
Chapter 20
Muscat, Oman
The weather was sunny and a dry eighty-four degrees, just a beautiful day. Pat and Walt were walking back from breakfast at the Blue Marlin. It was a pleasant surprise to discover the restaurant served bacon, a rare treat in the Middle East.
Someone was sitting on the flydeck. By the time they reached the boat, Mike was at the starboard gate to meet them. They shook hands. Walt stayed on the stern deck while Mike and Pat went into the salon and closed the glass doors for privacy.
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