Dangerous Grounds

by Don Keith

  Still, the shelter was visible easily from the road. Hardly the most secure spot for a drug drop.

  The place was littered with empty cans and food wrappers. A couple of bottles of water and several boxes of food were sitting in the shade under the lean-to, almost as if someone had known a couple of naked, hungry jail breakers might be ambling by.

  Kincaid stepped inside and plopped down on the ground. He grabbed one of the water bottles and tossed it to Luna, who dropped the bundles and deftly caught it. Kincaid twisted the top off the other one, studied its contents, smelled it, tasted a little of it, and then took a long, noisy swallow.

  “Piss warm, but it still tastes good,” he said after draining half the bottle. “Wonder what else we have on the menu.” He pulled one of the food boxes toward him and looked inside. “Hey, what have we here?” he muttered as he snatched up an envelope that was caught on the tape that held the box’s top shut. He tugged documents out of the envelope and studied them for a moment. “Well. Looks like airplane tickets. Kuala Lumpur to Damascus. That’s an interesting itinerary for the average tourist.” Then he looked up at Luna and asked, “Bennie, any idea why we would find a ticket for tomorrow’s flight from Kuala Lumpur to Damascus in a lean-to full of drugs in the middle of a cane field in Mindanao?”

  Luna dropped down beside Kincaid with a groan. He took another chug from his bottle of water.

  “This ain’t a cold San Mig, but it still tastes pretty good.” He took the plane tickets from Kincaid and carefully looked them over. “Made out to somebody named al Shahir. Samu al Shahir. Ring any bells with you?”

  Kincaid shook his head as he drank the rest of the water.

  “Nope. Probably phony anyway. And right now, I’m way too hungry to do any serious detective work. What’s for lunch?”

  Luna tore open the carton and lifted out a clear plastic deli box.

  “Well, boss. You got a choice. You can have cold rice with mixed vegetables or you can have the chef’s special.”

  “And what would the ‘chef’s special’ be?”

  Luna chuckled as he pulled another box from the carton.

  “That would be mixed vegetables with cold rice.”

  Kincaid groaned.

  “Our unknown benefactors sure knew how to live. I think I’ll have the chef’s special.”

  Luna spotted something else in the box. He reached back in and pulled out a bundle of pamphlets.

  “These were in here too. Want a little light reading with your dinner? I don’t speak Arabic, so you’ll have to do the honors.”

  Kincaid took one of the tracts and looked it over as he chewed the first huge bite of the cold food.

  “Well, for starters, this is not Arabic,” he said. “It’s modern Persian, the official language in Iran. I’m not much on Persian either, but it appears that what we have here is a diatribe on the evils of Israel and those godless infidels, the Americans. Hezbollah at its literary best.”

  Luna continued to chew as he leaned back looked around the primitive site. He cocked his head and said, “Mister detective, this is starting to look like some clues. I think we may have stumbled across a connection between our old friend Sui Kia Shun, the drug lord, and a bunch of Islamic terrorists who need money to do their holy work.”

  Kincaid chewed on another mouthful of cold rice. He swallowed before he answered.

  “Either that or someone wants us to think that way. Bennie, my radar is up. This smells too pat. Why bust us out of jail, then dump our bare asses in the middle of a cane field where it would be so easy for us to stumble right into this lean-to? And why would any self-respecting drug lord who was helping terrorists raise money leave us such a pretty road map, pointing us halfway around the world? A road map, I might add, that was conveniently stuck to the food, so we would be damn sure to find it. You might say that I got my suspicions.”

  “OK, Kojack,” Luna said sardonically. “I bow to your superior worldliness and intellect. What do you Americans say? If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck? What do we do now?”

  Tom Kincaid raked the last of the rice and vegetables into his mouth with his bare hand.

  “We get up off our bare asses and we follow the road map. But we follow it in both directions.”

  The boat’s motor hummed quietly, the powerful vibration more felt than heard. It was barely a whisper above the gentle wave slaps against the fiberglass hull. The night was so dark that Sabul u Nurizam could not make out the other boat, even though it was only twenty meters away, riding in close formation.

  The cloud-draped night was perfect for hiding, for completing their bold mission. But Sabul had one question he dared not ask out loud. How would they ever see the pitch-black American submarine in this darkness?

  He clambered up on the foredeck and stood as tall as he could, scanning where he assumed the horizon was. Nothing visible in the total blackness. Nurizam climbed back into the cockpit, banging his shin painfully against the hard steel windshield frame. He mumbled curses as he felt his way along until he could plop down in the pilot’s chair.

  Surely Allah would provide. In all his greatness, he wouldn’t bring Nurizam to this point, only to let the infidel Americans slip innocently past them in the gloom. One must have faith in the ways of Allah.

  “Still nothing, Mullah?” Erinque Tagaytai whispered from behind him. The tall, heavy-set terrorist was almost invisible even though he sat on the transom only a couple of meters aft, cleaning his trusty AK-47 yet another time.

  “Faith, Enrique.” Nurizam whispered back. “You must have faith. Allah will answer our prayers. Now be quiet. Sound carries a long way over the water and the Americans have big ears indeed.”

  As if to confirm Nurizam’s whispered warning, Manju Shehab’s voice came across from the other boat.

  “Master, we see lights. A white one with a flashing yellow one below it. I think I also see a red one, too. Bearing zero-thee-five. I think they are coming this way.”

  Nurizam grabbed a pair of binoculars and jumped up on the foredeck again. He stood there, straining his eyes in the direction that Shehab had indicated. There didn’t appear to be anything out there but deep, impenetrable blackness. He slowly panned over the northeast quadrant a second time.

  Wait! There it was. Shehab must have the eyes of an eagle. The lights were little more than the barest glimmer on the horizon. He could just make out the white masthead light and the flashing yellow submarine ID light, the one that said conclusively that the Americans were stupidly steaming right into his trap.

  He talked across the water to Shehab, as quietly as he could and still be heard over the slight rumble of the idling motors.

  “Carefully work around to get astern the submarine. Just as we planned, you will sneak up from the starboard side. We will come in from the port after you have boarded the vessel. Go slowly. Do not let the American lookouts see you or hear you.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “May Allah grant us victory tonight,” Nurizam called out and again dropped into the pilot’s seat. He nudged the throttles ahead just enough to move the black boat through the water. The low engine hum changed to a quiet, throaty burble. Then he spun the wheel around to point the needle-sharp bow at a course that would quickly intercept the oncoming, unsuspecting American submarine.

  “Sure does get dark in this part of the world,” Jim Ward said. A sudden cloud cover masked the stars completely. There was no way to see anything beyond the bridge of the Corpus Christi as the giant nuclear submarine eased through the black water.

  “Gets that way out here this time of year,” Brad Hudson answered. The two men sat on the top of Corpus Christi’s sail, their feet dangling into the cockpit. Hudson was standing watch as the Officer of the Deck. Ward was his trainee and lookout. At 0220 local time, all was quiet. The sea was empty and nothing was happening below decks except for the men who were on watch, doing their jobs routinely as they steamed toward Singapore.

  “Reminds m
e of some of the caves my dad and I have explored back in Virginia,” Ward said. “You douse the lamps in there and it gets deathly dark and quiet.”

  “Yeah, the cloud cover socks in and it totally blanks out the stars. Add a moonless night and you get nothing but pitch black. Just thank your lucky stars we have GPS to steer through this mess. Even the radar isn’t much help around here, what with the number of rocks that don’t quite break the surface.” Hudson nodded back at the radar antennae a couple of feet aft, rotating just above their heads, searching the surrounding sea for danger. “Anyway, there’s one good thing about it being so dark. There’s nobody else out here but us chickens, and we’re heading for the roost as quick as we can get there.” He took a noisy sip from his steaming mug of coffee. “Hardest thing on this watch is to see if we can stay awake. We still have two more hours before we get to kick our reliefs out of their snug little racks.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ward answered. “Long as there’s nothing going on, can we discuss some casualty procedures? I’m ready to discuss fire, toxic gas, or Otto fuel spill.”

  Hudson chuckled.

  “XO’s really getting on your ass to qualify, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir, he sure is,” Ward answered, nodding vigorously. “But I don’t mind. I want to get my dolphins before we get to the Gulf. That’ll give me a little time to stand watch before I fly back to Annapolis.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you to cut out the ‘sir’ crap,” Hudson snorted, half seriously. “Just call me ‘Nav.’ I answer to that better. Anyway, don’t worry. You’ll get plenty of time to stand watch before we boot you back to the Academy.” Hudson took another sip of coffee and went on. “OK, so you think you’re ready for fire casualty procedures, do you? Let’s find out.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Ward answered “Uh, I mean, thank you…Nav.”

  “All right. You’re Diving Officer, steaming at four hundred feet, ahead one third. Fat, dumb, and happy. You hear over the 4MC, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire in the engine room!’ What do you do?”

  Ward started to reel off the well-remembered procedure, step by step. He was to the point of how to pressurize the fire main when a sudden painfully sharp chatter ripped the night apart all around the two men.

  There was no mistaking it. It was a burst of machine gun fire, tearing out of nowhere, out of everywhere at once.

  Brad Hudson screamed in pain and fell hard, back into the cockpit. Jim Ward felt something hot and wet splatter across his face and arm. He was blinded by the fire from the gun barrels that were spitting hot metal their way.

  The young Midshipman instinctively dove into the protective steel cocoon of the sub’s cockpit without ever worrying about how hard the landing was going to be. There was nowhere else to go.

  Even as he fell, he heard another savage burst of gunfire, ripping, pinging metallically, chewing up metal precisely where he and Hudson had just been resting. His youthful reflexes saved him.

  Then something large and heavy flew past Ward’s head where he tried to curl up into a ball on the floor of the cockpit. Whatever it was tumbled noisily down the open hatch. He had barely an instant to catch a whiff of acrid smoke before the gas grenade disappeared below.

  His head suddenly swirling, Jim Ward’s world did a stomach-churning flip-flop, turning dizzyingly upside-down.

  Then he was falling.

  Falling from some great height into darkness that was even more deep and total than that of the night out there on the Dangerous Grounds.

  Shehab was amazed by the sheer size of this leviathan they were attempting to capture. It made him pause for a split second, frightened by what the black devil might contain. He took a deep breath before he leaped from the pitching cigarette boat to the submarine’s slippery steel deck. Better the devil he didn’t know than the sure fate he knew if Nurizam found him cowering on the pitching little boat.

  Shehab tossed the carbon-fiber grappling hook upward and tugged on the line when it caught somewhere up there on the top of the sail. Shehab slipped the gas mask into place and pulled it tight before scurrying up the line.

  In only a moment, he found himself alone on the top of the American submarine.

  He dropped two quick gas grenades down the snorkel mast just as Nurizam had instructed him to do. Shehab heard a distinctive pair of low clunks as the magnets taped to the grenades made contact with the snorkel mast. It was impossible to see, but Shehab knew that the grenades were dumping their toxic contents directly into the sub’s air intake.

  He dropped a grenade down the sub’s open hatch, and followed that with another gas grenade down the same hatch. Wait thirty seconds, he thought as he counted them off under his breath, and then scoot down the ladder.

  When he reached thirty, Shehab dutifully dropped down the ladder without even thinking of what he might be falling into. It took only a moment to realize that he was all alone, standing in the middle of the submarine’s control room. Motionless bodies lay across panels that were filled with a staggering array of unintelligible blinking lights. There seemed to be gauges and dials and electronic screens stuck to every inch of the walls. How could anyone steer this machine, he thought. How could any man understand what all the meters and flashing numbers were saying? It was too much, he quickly decided. Allah would surely not approve of such a beast.

  Shehab danced his AK-47 around the narrow little room like a cobra seeking a warm mouse to strike. Nothing moved. He nudged one of the inert forms with the toe of his boot. The body rolled over heavily. The young man’s unblinking, empty eyes stared up at him.

  He quickly moved to another sailor, and then to a third. All of them were gone. Gone to face Allah and answer for what they had done on earth.

  Shehab proudly sucked in a chest full of air through the filter of the gas mask. They had done it! The American submarine was theirs!

  Then Shehab felt more than heard a presence behind him. As quick as a jungle cat, he turned and lunged to his left; his Kalashnikov AK-47 at the ready.

  Nurizam was standing there at the bottom of the ladder, his visage unmistakable even with the gas mask hiding most of his face. He looked directly at Shehab.

  “As I foretold, Allah has provided. The American warship is ours. Now, have the men gather all the crew that still lives and bring them into the mess decks space. Don’t forget the pair up on the bridge either.”

  Shehab quickly moved off to do his master’s bidding while their other men climbed down the ladder into the control room.

  Almost as an afterthought, Nurizam called out after him.

  “Shehab, please remember that we need the Americans to operate this ship. Keep as many alive as possible until we find out which ones are essential for that purpose.” Shehad nodded and left the room. Almost beneath his breath, the terrorist completed his thought. “And then, when their purpose is served, we will grant them all the merciful death they in no way deserve.”

  25

  Enrique Tagaytai rudely yanked the unconscious sailor out of the helmsman seat and dropped him hard onto the steel deck. Then he stepped over the inert form and plopped down in the empty seat. The maze of meters and scales that filled the glass panel in front of him was more than he could ever hope to understand. It wouldn’t matter. The description they had procured of driving a submarine on the surface was correct. The operation wasn’t much more difficult than driving a car. The compass display and the wheel was all he needed. It would be two hours or more before the Americans started to awaken, if they ever woke at all. At least that was the promise of the Chechens who had supplied the gas they had used to help subdue this mighty beast.

  “Enrique, steer zero-three-six,” Nurizam called out, his voice loud in the quiet control room. The Abu Sayuff leader was peering out the periscope and watching a tiny white light on the stern of one of the cigarette boats. The other boat had already disappeared from view, leading the way a few thousand yards ahead.

  “Come around to zero-four-five,” Nurizam shouted,
this time with a bit of urgency in his voice.

  The terrorist was using the little boat to guide them through the labyrinth of reefs and shoals that separated the sub from the safe, deep water closer to Mindanao. The speed indicator said that they were making five knots. That should give them plenty of time to steer around the reefs and submerged rocks, but Nurizam had already calculated that they wouldn’t be nearly far enough away from the point of the boarding when the sun came up. How could they possibly hide something as large as this great, black monster when the Americans came looking for their lost submarine? He didn’t have an immediate answer, but as usual he was certain that Allah would provide when the time came.

  “Steer one-two-one” Nurizam said as he glanced up at the little red-lit compass readout on the scope.

  The sleek cigarette boat in front of them easily corkscrewed through the dangerous waters. Steering the huge submarine was an entirely different matter. And with only ten of his people onboard the massive vessel, it was a real gamble they were taking. Nurizam could only hope that the intelligence he had paid for was accurate, that they would be able to move behind the guide boat without grounding this giant fish. Neither he nor any of his men had ever set foot on a submarine before. With Allah’s grace, they would be able to guide the big, ungainly ship until some of the crew revived. Then the American sailors would be forced to drive their vessel. Drive it or die if they refused.

  A speaker blared somewhere behind Nurizam’s right ear.

  “Mullah, this is Wahab. I am in the engine space. I think I understand this throttle thing.”

  Nurizam waited, his every sense keyed toward the next report. Zarguj Wahab wasn’t the brightest warrior under his command but everyone else was occupied at the moment, dragging the dazed and unconscious Americans into a central location. Nurizam had to be able to control the submarine’s complex engine room if he was going to have any chance of success. Wahab had to figure out how to determine the submarine’s speed if they were to have any hope of getting back to Palawan safely before the sun was high and the news had spread that the vessel had been hijacked.