When the Parliament adjourned, I made my way downstairs to the second floor and went in search of Onassis’s office. David had done a good job providing me with the details of the building. I walked slowly to the end of the corridor where his office was located. I hunched my shoulders and kept my movements consistent with the grey wig, beard, and glasses I was wearing.
When I entered the office, I was greeted by a heavy-set receptionist. Two other men in suits were sitting in the waiting area.
“I have an appointment with Mr. Onassis; is he in?” I asked.
“May I have your name, sir?” the woman replied in excellent English.
“Stanley Harrison.”
The woman looked at the calendar on her computer and turned back to me.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Harrison, but you are not on the schedule. Please leave your contact information and I will ask if Mr. Onassis wants me to schedule an appointment.”
“Miss, it is imperative that I see him. Could you please let him know that I am here and that I have news from Yan Shunkai? He is sure to want to see me, as Yan is the leader of a Chinese Triad and he recently paid Mr. Onassis three million euros to smuggle Chinese goods into the EU.”
I made sure to speak loud enough for the two gentlemen in the waiting area to hear me.
The receptionist looked flustered. She picked up the phone and spoke in Greek to someone. I didn’t wait for an answer. I continued through the wooden double doors into the inner office where I found another secretary and several offices. From the placard on the center one, it was easy to find where Onassis worked.
“I’m going in to see Mr. Onassis.” The secretary didn’t attempt to stop me. I shuffled to the door with my stooped question mark-shaped back and walked through the open door. Inside, I found Onassis and another man about the same age as the MP. Onassis said something to me, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was scanning the top of his desk.
“Are you involved in the bribes Onassis is taking from the Chinese Government?” I asked the man standing next to Onassis.
“What are you talking about? Get out of here. Who do you think you are?” the man demanded. While the man was protesting my presence, I picked up a letter opener from Onassis’s desk and drove the blade upward under his chin and into the brain of Mr. Onassis. Before the other man could even process what was happening, I struck him hard with a downward blow with my right hand. I pulled a pair of leather driving gloves from my heavy winter overcoat and put them on. Then I removed a handkerchief and wiped down the handle of the paper opener that was sticking out of Onassis’ throat.
I wiped and locked the office door before I exited. The secretary eyeballed me as I shuffled past her but did not say anything. I walked past the receptionist and received the same hostile body language. Once inside the corridor, I took the first set of stairs down to the first floor. I maintained my posture and foot speed even though, with each passing second, I was worried the man I hit in the office would regain consciousness and sound the alarm or the secretary would unlock the door.
I made it past security and through the visitor entrance door into the cold Athens afternoon. I picked up my gait as I moved off the Parliament grounds. Behind the building is a huge park. The front of the Parliament building is a football-field-sized open concrete area that serves as the visitors’ entrance and also houses a couple of memorials. I reached the main avenue and crossed. Once across the street, I turned left and then, after fifty yards, turned right at a side street. I found the public restroom and, after checking for cameras, I entered the men’s lavatory. I was alone in the small men’s room. I removed my wig, beard, and glasses and threw them into the trash dispenser. I took off my heavy, long black overcoat and hung it in the toilet stall. I left the men’s room looking much younger and clean shaven, wearing a blue patterned fleece jacket and a baseball cap.
I continued along the same road, walking toward the Acropolis. I found a taxi and told him to take me to the Athens Port. I paid the cabbie in cash and walked down the pier to my charter. The boat ride to Kythnos took two hours. I spent the time inside the warm cabin reading magazines. When we finally docked, I was thrilled to see not a single police officer. I found a taxi and had them take me to the marina on the other side of the island where I had the Nomad tied up.
The boat ride to Paphos, Cyprus, was a twelve-hour trip, but I was only at sea for less than an hour when I got a call from Mike on my satphone.
“Where are you?”
“I’m about an hour west of Rhodes, heading home.”
“Jesus, I cannot believe you did that.”
“What are you hearing out of Athens?”
“MP Onassis was murdered in his office. The man who killed him was a tall, English-speaking elderly man with a beard. Witnesses heard him accuse the MP of accepting bribes from the Chinese Government to cover up a Chinese smuggling operation. Another MP was in Onassis’s office during the attack. He was knocked unconscious and is in the hospital receiving treatment for a concussion. A massive manhunt is underway.”
“Rumor has it, the vigilante got away.”
“Rumor has it.”
“I’ll bet the next MP the Chinese make an offer to passes on the deal.”
“The one place the Chinese can’t provide security is inside the Parliament building. I’m guessing they’ve identified that weakness by now.”
“Ya think?”
“What are your plans?”
“Back to surfing in Siargao, then to wherever Dave sends me and the boys. I’m guessing Karachi; we’ve slowed down things enough in Kenya and Greece for a while.”
“You didn’t take any of the boys?”
“No, I didn’t want them involved. Easier this way if something went wrong.”
“Did anything go wrong?”
“No, I don’t think so. Although I don’t plan on coming back to Greece anytime soon.”
“Good idea. I’ll let you know if your name comes up anywhere.”
“What are you going to tell your higher-ups?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? They’ll figure it out if they haven’t already, but it’s best to leave it alone.”
“Yup, never happened.”
“Never happened.”
The rest of the trip to Cyprus went without a hitch. I used a different marina because everyone at the Paphos Marina knew me on sight. After clearing customs, I tied up at a slip in the Limassol Marina, which is thirty miles east of Paphos. Unlike the Paphos Marina that has its fair share of fishing and work vessels, the Paphos Marina is filled with yachts and even a few super yachts. It was evening by the time I finished fueling and completed the after-operation maintenance. I slept with a pistol under my pillow just in case my cover wasn’t as good as I thought it was.
I rented a car at the nearby Yacht Club and drove to the Trident office at Paphos Airport. It was a beautiful late winter morning; the sun was shining, and it was seventy degrees by mid-morning when I pulled up next to the hangar. I found the guys loading the C-130J with pallets of ammunition crates when I walked in. The ramp on the aircraft was down and pallets were being loaded into it with a remote control Palfinger forklift. I watched for a couple of minutes and then walked over to the guys who were building air pallets.
“Why are you rebuilding the pallets?” I asked.
“They came with like items, but they want us to deliver mixed packs.”
“I guess that makes sense. Where is this load heading?”
“Benghazi.”
I went around and talked with the crew. Eventually, I watched the ramp come up and our tug pulled the aircraft outside the hangar. The four turboprops on the big black Hercules came to life, and the plane rolled down the tarmac toward the runway. I caught up with Migos and McDonald in the break area located off to the side of the massive hangar interior.
“What have you been up to, boss?”
“Surfing Cloud-9 in Siargao. What about you?”
“Working and w
aiting on you to give us our next assignment.”
“Wait’s over. The next mission is in Gwadar, Pakistan, about ten miles from the Iranian border.”
“What are we going to do to Gwadar?” McDonald asked.
“Same thing we did in Kenya; we’re going to make the port unusable.”
“That shouldn’t be too tough.”
“It will be harder. Gwadar is the end of the overland route from China to the Arabian Sea. The Chinese are building an oil pipeline so that a conflict in the South China Sea where 100% of their oil supplies currently travel can have an alternate route in case of crisis.”
“What does that mean to us?”
“It means that, unlike the last port that was guarded by a handful of drug-using untrained Africans, Gwadar is protected by over a thousand Chinese private security guards.”
“I can see where that might be a problem,” Migos said.
“We’ll figure it out. I’ve asked David to fly in today and do the intel for us. We’ll spend the next few days hammering out a plan and then prepping.”
“Sounds good,” McDonald chirped in.
Chapter 24
Beijing, China
Huang waved to the receptionist on the way into the Minister of State Security’s office. He was a frequent visitor and she knew to wave him through without delay. He was often running up the four flights of stairs to visit the Minister two or three times a day. Despite his position in the Chinese hierarchy, the Minister was convinced all of his electronic communications were being monitored by Chinese Intelligence, which is why he relied on face to face meetings as much as possible.
“Did you find anything?” the Minister asked, as Huang was sitting down on the couch in the office seating area.
“I believe the man who killed Onassis was Pat Walsh.” Huang subconsciously rubbed his crooked jawline at the mention of Walsh.
“It was a CIA hit, then?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“Can you prove it was Pat Walsh?”
“Not completely. The only evidence on the scene is some camera footage taken inside the Parliament building and some outside. He was disguised in both.”
“Then what makes you think it was Pat Walsh?”
“I took a lot of surveillance footage on Walsh in the Bahamas.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“The man who killed Onassis had glasses and a thick beard, making facial recognition impossible. I ran the footage from Greece and the footage from the Bahamas through a gait analysis program. The footage taken inside the Parliament building had a 20% matching value. The footage taken outside the building had a 92% match; he must have been disguising his walk when he was inside, but once outside, he had to hurry and discarded the deception.”
“If we tested every person in the world, how many would have a 92% or higher match probability?” asked the Minister.
“Millions, possibly as many as a hundred million, is my guess.”
“Gait analysis is not very conclusive then, is it?”
“Combined with everything else we know about Walsh, it’s a much stronger case that it was him.”
“There was nothing else, fingerprints, DNA, anything at all?”
“No, Minister.”
“Ever since Eleuthera, you’ve had a fixation on Walsh. Keep an open mind on this; follow facts and evidence. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to fit the evidence to a premature conclusion.”
“Yes, Minister. I hope it is acceptable that I have returned surveillance to his home in Eleuthera and his marina and hangar in Paphos, Cyprus.”
“That’s fine. But remember, the problem is the entire CIA and possibly the US military; it’s much bigger than Pat Walsh.”
“My net is large, sir.”
“These attacks against our assets in Africa, Asia, and Europe are becoming very expensive, both politically and economically. We need to put a stop to them.”
“How do we do that? We can’t intercept every attack.”
“We need to catch the Americans in the act of sabotaging one of their allies or a friendly nation’s transportation assets and then we need to expose what they are doing to the world. We will humiliate them and create an international relations scandal; that will force them to stop.”
“We could always counter-attack.”
“We’ve been doing that. Your job is defense. Leave the offense to others.”
“I’ve been working on a defensive strategy.”
“What do you have?”
“I don’t think they’ll hit Mombasa, Djibouti, or Athens again for a while. They’ve had a sufficient amount of success on those targets and it wouldn’t make sense to attack them again in the near future. I’m concentrating my agents on the transit point in Malaysia, Pakistan, Laos, and Cambodia. I intend to pick them up on their infiltration and then catch them in the act of sabotage. I’m confident we will be successful.”
“We need to succeed. The Americans are getting very aggressive. They’ve moved three carrier strike groups into the South China Sea and they’re backing the territorial rights to the Spratlys by Vietnam and Philippines. We’re not even able to access the reefs to begin reconstruction.”
“I won’t disappoint you, Minister.”
“I know you won’t, Huang.”
Huang left the Minister’s office more committed than ever.
Chapter 25
Indian Ocean
Our C130 lifted off at midnight on a flight that was cleared from Dhafra Air Force Base in UAE to Mumbai, India. We’d spent the previous night inside the Trident hangar, well within the protection of the perimeter fence of the UAE’s largest Air Force Base. For years we’d been supplying the Kurdish Peshmerga and other American allies fighting ISIS from our Dhafra facility that had been generously donated for that purpose by the UAE Government, who were equally invested in eradicating ISIS. We don’t use the Dhafra hangar as much as we used to, but it’s still a comfortable place to stage out of when necessary.
The Hercules was flying on a southeast heading. We crossed over from UAE to Oman and then over the Gulf of Oman. Our time to target was just under two hours. Gwadar Port is located almost directly across the Gulf of Oman from Muscat. From my seat, I watched Sachse, the flight loadmaster, stick all of his fingers up into the air to signal the ten-minute warning. The interior lights turned to red and the back ramp of the C130 started to open. We were flying five thousand feet above the Gulf which meant the cabin was pressurized and that there would be no need for oxygen masks.
McDonald, Savage, and I connected our parachute static lines to a metal cable that ran the length of the cargo compartment. The four of us were up almost as far as the cockpit because most of the cargo area was filled with a black twenty-four-foot midget submarine that was propped up on a Marine Craft Aerial Delivery (MCAD) System. The four-ton swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) was shaped like a pregnant torpedo and was resting on the MCAD, which is little more than an aluminum sled used to brace the six-man underwater boat and keep it upright while it’s on a solid surface. The floor of the C-130 cargo bay has two rows of parallel steel rollers that’ll allow the flat aluminum base of the MCAD to roll smoothly out the cargo door with minimum resistance.
From my position as the lead jumper, I watched Sachse release the tie-downs on both sides of the MCAD. The wiry Kentuckian crawled on top of the SDV and played with the chutes rigged on top of the sub. Sachse pulled out a small bundle of green silk from a sealed compartment and slid down to the cargo floor. The Hercules was traveling at a hundred and thirty-five knots and the noise of the engines and the rush of the air made it difficult to hear the thirty-second warning when it came over my headset.
With his arm extended toward the open cargo door, Sachse let the tiny parachute canopy fly into the rushing air. The extractor parachute flew out the rear cargo door and snapped open when the cord that was anchored to the SDV played out to its full length, thirty feet behind the aircraft. The SDV sprang into m
otion, quickly picking up speed as it slid over the rollers and launched into the night sky. I chased after the SDV until I, too, was outside of the aircraft and falling. When I felt the sharp jerk of my parachute opening, I reached up above my shoulders and grabbed the steering toggles. I turned left when I spotted the three billowing chutes of the SDV. Beneath the cargo parachutes, I could see the marking lights on the SDV and when I looked closer to the surface, I could just barely make out the smaller parachute holding the freshly separated MCAD.
The moon was bright, and it was easy to follow the SDV down to the sea. I knew McDonald and Savage were above and slightly behind me. I heard the belly-flop sound of the sub hitting the water. I hoped the water-activated floats kicked into action, otherwise getting the sub into operation was going to be a lot harder.
I unclipped most of my rigging before reaching the water. The moment my fleet splashed into the warm Gulf, I released my leg straps and then my chest strap. I was free of my parachute harness while still plunging down into the depths. As soon as my descent stopped, I crawled upward toward the light of the moon making sure to break the surface a distance from my parachute. I took a big breath of air and then looked around for the SDV. The water was rough, and it took me a moment to find the green marker light. I had to find a time when I was riding up on a swell and had some visibility. It was only seventy-five yards to the SDV and because I was wearing just a wetsuit and a plastic bump helmet, I covered the distance quickly. When I reached the SDV, I climbed on top and began to remove the parachute rigging. I could see the marking lights of McDonald and Savage coming my way and before long all three of us were prepping the SDV for operation. While on top of the SDV, I opened the forward hatch and allowed McDonald to slide into the partially-submerged control compartment. He put on the full-face diving mask that was connected to the onboard air system. The mask was also connected to the SDV internal and radio communications system. McDonald began to power up the systems including the obstacle avoidance radar, GPS, inertial navigation system, and the four cameras that surrounded the sub. After a few minutes, he told us over our comm sets to begin releasing the supplemental buoyancy packs. Savage and I donned the rest of our scuba gear and began pulling the quick releases on each side of the sub to set the buoyancy packs loose.
Rising Sea Page 14