Bioweapon

by James Barrington

  ‘They’ll probably guess it isn’t a rock pretty quickly,’ Moloch said, ‘but it could still work. Don’t forget that there’s been conflict in this area for decades, so encountering some kind of munition wouldn’t be all that surprising. They’re not even certain that they’ve shifted all the mines from the Suez Canal. And I think we can take this plan maybe a couple of steps further, to make it work even better for us.’

  He explained briefly what he had in mind.

  ‘Now that’s clever,’ Moore said. ‘Can we do it?’

  ‘No reason why not,’ Moloch said. ‘The ship must have ropes that float. We’ll need extra flotation devices, something to take the weight, but that’s just a matter of trial and error. Are we all happy with this?

  ‘It’s the best idea we’ve had so far,’ Richter said. ‘It covers stopping the target vessel, what to do with the other ship and guarantees we can recover the bioweapon, so I’ll go for it. I mean, with a bit of luck, the Iranians will end up doing most of the work for us.’

  Masters and Moore both nodded.

  ‘Just one thing,’ Richter said. ‘I need to ask the captain a question.’

  He walked across the mess room to the wall phone, dialled the bridge and held a short conversation with the man who picked up the line. Then he strode back to the others and nodded.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Masters asked.

  ‘Just tying up a loose end,’ Richter said, and explained what he’d asked and why.

  Moloch stood up.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ll get things under way right now. We’ll time it for around dusk this evening, when the visibility starts to degrade. We’ll have a full formal briefing here in the mess room at 1600 hours.’

  Chapter 55

  MV Muttrah, Red Sea off Yanbu, Saudi Arabia

  Tuesday

  They were ready in all respects by 18:00. It hadn’t taken as long as Richter had expected for the device to be constructed. The ship’s stores had generous stocks of rope used for various purposes, from the thick and heavy mooring ropes down to what amounted to little more than twine and selecting a rope of suitable thickness and cutting it to the appropriate length took only a few minutes. The buoyancy aids they also required were not difficult either. There were a couple of dozen empty plastic containers on board the ship that had previously held lubricating oil or other fluids, and it was really a matter of picking one that would support the weight of the two key components of the device. What they needed was for the buoyancy aid to float on the surface of the sea something like an iceberg, with most of the object under water, where it would be less likely to be noticed by a lookout on the target vessel.

  ‘Mind you,’ Masters had said while they were selecting the most appropriate size containers, ‘with the amount of garbage there is floating around in the Red Sea, I think we could almost toss them over the side as they are or even paint them Day-Glo orange and pretend they were markers for lobster pots or fishing nets, and nobody would even notice.’

  ‘You might be right,’ Richter said, ‘but we can’t take the chance of them spotting something and doing a screaming Jesus turn to try to avoid it. That’s why we’re going to choose the right size, and also why we’re going to paint them black. It’s amazing how clearly a white object shows up on the surface of the sea at night.’

  Both the containers they had selected were made of heavy-duty white plastic with black lettering on the side indicating the nature of their original contents. And they weren’t going to paint them in the conventional sense of the word. Instead, they’d found a half-empty tin of a thick black substance, almost like waterproof creosote, which one of the crew members on the Muttrah had used to slap a very rough black coating on each of the containers, concentrating on the lower half opposite the moulded handle, because they would both be floating upside down when they deployed the device.

  While all that was going on, two of Moloch’s men were busy constructing the business end, or in fact the two business ends, of the weapon they were going to use against the target ship. They were building two of them, one for each end of the rope.

  The core component of each was precisely half of the total amount of C4 plastic explosive the SEALs had brought with them onto the ship. That was probably overkill, but they definitely didn’t want to use too little explosive because they knew they would only get the one chance. If it didn’t work, they were back to ramming or boarding as the only remaining options. And although water is largely incompressible and the steel hull of a ship is thick, none of them could really forecast exactly how much damage the explosion would cause. If they had been able to secure the plastic explosive directly to the hull of the ship, like a limpet mine, the calculations would have been a lot easier, and the explosions much more focused.

  The other problem they had was the fusing. For obvious reasons, they would be unable to detonate the explosives using a radio signal or other remote control device, because they would be underwater. Equally using a trembler that would detonate the charges when it received a hard enough impact wouldn’t work reliably simply because it would be in an open seaway, where a wave might quite easily produce enough of a shock to fire it prematurely. There were other types of fuse they could have used, but none they had with them. The SEALs had been travelling fairly light, with only a basic supply of mixed ordnance.

  In the end, they opted for the only method they had that they knew would work: each pack of C4 would have a fifteen-minute fuse inserted in it, and the SEAL team that would be launching it would start the fuse running immediately before they deployed the device. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best they could do.

  As night started to fall, the Muttrah reduced speed to what the Captain decided would be a safe speed to launch a skiff, about five knots. The deck crew removed the lashings on one of the boats, and efficiently placed lifting straps around the hull of the small vessel. Before they lowered it, two of the SEALs – their names were John Groves and Bob Whelan – who were now wearing casual working clothing like the rest of the crew of the freighter, climbed aboard. They each carried a pistol and a Heckler & Koch MP5, a combat knife, a two-way radio and a set of night-vision goggles – NVGs – but all that equipment was concealed from view. They’d already checked that the outboard engine was working properly, and they’d trans-shipped another outboard into the skiff just in case there was a problem, along with a spare can of fuel. The last thing they loaded into the boat was the fabricated weapon, which they handled with noticeable care. The two fuses and four spares, just in case, were in a separate small rigid container and would be inserted by them at the last possible moment.

  The crane swung the skiff over the side, the rest of the SEALs watching as it descended towards the water, the outboard engine already running. Taking orders from a deck officer, the crane driver stopped the descent about three feet above the waves, waited until the bow was pointed directly forward, and then gave the instruction to lower the rest of the way.

  The skiff bounced, then settled, the helmsman opening the throttle on the outboard until the two vessels, the large and the small, matched speed. Then the second SEAL reached up, unhitched one end of each loading strap from the crane’s hook and waited as the jib raised the straps clear of the skiff. Then the two men waved and the small boat accelerated away, easily overtaking the Muttrah which, even then, was steadily increasing speed in pursuit of the target ship.

  The plan was brilliant in its simplicity, and startlingly open to almost everything going wrong. They doubted if the skiff would attract much attention from the other ship, small boats being a common sight in the area, and assumed it would be able to get well ahead of the target before manoeuvring to get into the right position, close to the shore. What the two SEALs then had to do was wait until the ship was about a mile away, then set out as if they were going out into the central part of the Red Sea – lots of small fishing boats did that – and cross its path. They would have no lights showing and would probably be invi
sible in the dark to any lookouts. And even if they were seen, they would just be two local men in a small open boat, and no possible threat to the ship carrying the bioweapon.

  As they did that, and directly in front of the approaching ship, which they’d be able to see using their NVGs, they were to insert both detonators into the C4 explosive and arm them, then lower one end of the improvised weapon into the sea and pay out the rest of the rope. When they literally reached the end of the rope, they would lower the second explosive pack. The rope was thin, buoyant and some 100 metres in length, and Moloch and Richter had calculated that this would be long enough to ensure that the target ship snagged it as it headed north towards the Suez Canal, as long as the deployment was accurate. Its forward motion would drag the rope along both sides of the ship, and at least one of the two packs of explosive, maybe both, depending on where the bow caught the rope, would end up resting beside the hull, a couple of feet below the waterline. Then they would continue heading west across the Red Sea, putting some distance between themselves and the ship.

  A ship travelling at ten knots will cover a mile in about six minutes, so roughly nine minutes after the deployment of the weapon and with the ship dragging the roped charges through the water, the two packs of C4 would fire almost simultaneously.

  That was the plan, but it was filled with far more assumptions and variables than Richter or anyone else was happy with. But it was all they had, so there was no choice but to run with it.

  Chapter 56

  MV Muttrah, Red Sea off Yanbu, Saudi Arabia

  Tuesday

  The surface of the Red Sea was choppy, the waves bigger than they had appeared from the deck of the Muttrah, but that was normal and exactly what Groves and Whelan had expected: the sea state always looked calmer from the deck of a ship than from a tiny boat bouncing along on the surface. It wasn’t especially rough, but it was uncomfortable, certainly, the bow of the skiff powering into the waves and sending sprays of salt water out to each side, and quite a lot of it into the skiff itself.

  As a complication, in order to overtake the target vessel the skiff could only be steered within a fairly narrow range of headings and that direction was not, predictably enough, the direction from which the waves were approaching the boat. That was from fine on the port beam, which meant the bouncing motion was overlaid with a pronounced rolling every time the skiff slid down into a trough between the waves. All that reduced their forward progress rather more than they had expected, but the two men were experienced SEALs, at home on or in the water, and they were used to it. All it really meant was that they couldn’t go quite as fast as they had expected to which, in turn, meant they were overhauling the target ship a little slower than they’d planned. The fact that the Muttrah had taken quite a distance to reduce speed before it was travelling slowly enough to launch the skiff had factored in a further delay.

  But none of this appeared to matter, because the skiff was travelling at about twenty knots and would still pass the target within around ten minutes of the planned time. And time wasn’t even particularly critical. The only other factor was that they’d checked the radar display before they prepared to launch the skiff, looking for a sizeable gap in the constant ship traffic up and down the Red Sea, and the two SEALs knew they had about thirty minutes before the ships would encounter more vessels heading south.

  While Groves steered the skiff, Whelan began his final preps on the improvised weapon. The biggest part of the fabricated device consisted of the buoyancy aid, the black-painted plastic container, which had been half-filled with water so that it would float just below the surface, only the very top of it – in fact the bottom of the container because it would be floating upside down – visible in the waves. A rope had been tied around the handle of the container, and about a metre below that was the explosive itself.

  C4 – Composition 4 – is remarkably stable and is unaffected by water, and the biggest problem they’d had was devising some kind of container that would hold the plastic explosive securely and be rigid enough to protect the fuses when the device was flung against the side of the ship. The worst case scenario, obviously, would be for the impact with the target’s hull to knock the detonators out of the C4, which would reduce the explosive to nothing more than a lump of harmless putty.

  They’d been limited, obviously, by what they had been able to find in the ship’s storerooms, but they had cobbled together something that they thought should work. In the cubical box on deck was the equipment they would have needed if they were going to board the target ship from the skiffs, including grappling irons, climbing ropes, rope ladders and so on, and Moloch was hopefully peering inside the box when he realised that a couple of the grappling hooks would do the job. He picked out two of them, but they needed something else.

  The best they could do was line the inner part of the grappling hooks with aluminium foil from the ship’s galley to create a kind of rudimentary container. Then his men wrapped and moulded the C4 into the cavity, pressing it down hard so that it would stay in place. But they needed something else to make sure the device remained intact, and again the ship’s stores helped out. They took a couple of small plastic buckets, drilled half a dozen holes in their bottoms so that they wouldn’t float, and then placed one of the grappling hook charges in each of them. The bucket would serve to protect the device when it hit the side of the target ship. Or that was what they hoped, anyway.

  They both saw the cargo ship in the distance as they cleared the port side of the Muttrah, and Groves steered towards it, but a couple of times he brought the skiff to almost a complete standstill in the water as he approached, as if he and his companion were checking lobster pots or fishing nets, which he hoped would make the vessel look innocent and, more importantly, establish a pattern in the minds of the men he was sure would be watching the boat’s approach from the bridge and the deck of the freighter, which they could now see clearly.

  ‘Can’t make out the name,’ Whelan said, staring at the ship’s stern, ‘but it’s registered in Valletta, Malta.’

  ‘Probably not Maltese, then,’ Groves replied. ‘That’s a flag of convenience, nothing more. Could be pretty much any nationality.’

  Groves steered the skiff past the freighter, keeping about three hundred yards clear of its port side, and steering a straight course. He again brought the skiff to a halt when it was almost abeam the cargo ship, and the two men bent over the side of the boat, pretending to fiddle with something in the water, before resuming the northerly course.

  ‘Reckon that’s about a mile and a quarter right now,’ Whelan said.

  Then they both checked the alignment. Groves had steered the skiff over to starboard, so that it was now fine on the starboard bow of the target ship, pretty much where they wanted it to be.

  Groves nodded and closed the throttle.

  Whelan inserted the fuse into the compacted C4 and triggered it, and did the same for the other explosive device. Then he and Whelan lifted one end of the weapon and lowered it over the side of the skiff, the side opposite the approaching ship, and both watched critically as it settled into the choppy water. It floated as they had expected, the black-painted bottom of the partly-filled plastic container projecting only three or four inches above the surface. It would be virtually invisible in the gathering darkness.

  ‘Looks good,’ Whelan said, and began paying out the linking rope as Groves steered the skiff across the Red Sea towards the Egyptian shore.

  Less than a minute later, the two men lowered the other end into the sea and Groves started to steer the skiff west again. They’d gone maybe a couple of hundred yards when Whelan’s radio crackled into life.

  ‘Golf Whisky, this is Hotel Bravo. Tango course change, over.’

  ‘What the fuck?’ Whelan muttered.

  ‘Golf Whisky’ was the callsign of the skiff – just the initial letters of the surnames of the two SEALs – ‘Hotel Bravo’ was the Muttrah – ‘home base’, and ‘Tango’ was the u
niversal designator for a target or member of the opposition or enemy.

  ‘Clarify, over,’ Whelan responded.

  ‘Five degrees to port, over.’

  ‘Roger, out.’

  Nobody in the military ever, under any circumstances, says ‘over and out’ because it’s completely meaningless and internally contradictory. ‘Over’ means ‘I have finished what I was saying, now over to you to reply’, while ‘out’ means ‘That is the end of my transmission.’

  Groves swung the skiff around in a tight circle until it was directly in line with the bow of the freighter.

  Whelan was staring back the way they’d come, his set of NVGs now on his head.

  ‘They’re right,’ he said. ‘The fucking ship’s turned.’

  ‘You reckon they’ve seen the IED?’

  Groves pulled on his NVGs as well, the ship instantly visible in the greenish glow the device produced.

  ‘No clue,’ Whelan replied. ‘But I’m buggered if I can see the float and I’m only about twenty yards away from it.’

  Then Whelan’s radio crackled again.

  ‘Golf Whisky from Hotel Bravo, suspect routine course change. Out.’

  And then both men guessed the reason. Looking around, they could see a slight kink in the coastline of the Red Sea in the vicinity of Yanbu: the eastern shore to the north of them was slightly differently aligned than the shore to the south. If the coaster hadn’t turned and had maintained the same heading as previously, it would have run aground a few miles to the north. The new course would keep the ship parallel to the eastern shoreline. That was good news – they presumably hadn’t been spotted – but also bad news, as Groves immediately realised.

  ‘It’s going to miss the rope,’ he said. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Pretty much, yeah. Might just catch it, but I doubt it.’

  The clock was ticking. The detonators had been armed and inserted, and if they did nothing about it – and quickly – the ship would pass the device and the two charges would detonate harmlessly a few minutes later, and well behind the vessel. If that happened, they were back to ramming or boarding it, and the explosions would have alerted everybody on board the freighter because they would assume, correctly, that it was some kind of enemy action, so either option would be difficult at best.