Captain Marvin Bennett, the skipper of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) cursed under his breath as the convoy slowly made its way down the narrow canal. With a beam of 134 feet at the waterline widening to 252 feet at the flight-deck level, someone standing at the edge of the flight deck would look straight down onto the roads flanking the canal.
A missile cruiser and a destroyer led the way, followed by Lincoln, a Virginia-class submarine, another missile cruiser, a frigate, and two resupply ships.
Standing on vulture’s row, Bennett looked down at the road alongside the edge of the canal, where a small army dispatched by the Egyptian government to protect the convoy followed the ships.
And Bennett appreciated the effort, but the skipper of Lincoln longed for the safety of the open sea, counting down the minutes until he cleared this damn waterway.
Once a small and fairly remote airport, Borg El Arab had become the principal airport for Alexandria after the closure of the Alexandria International Airport in 2011. Located twenty-five miles south of the legendary coastal city, it provided services for more than a dozen airlines with flights coming from as far away as Turkey, Kuwait, and Syria.
Tariq al-Kayyam taxied a KC-130H Hercules aerial refueling tanker to the designated parking spot on the Aswan airport ramp, next to another Hercules flown by his fellow pilot, Wassim Nuwas. Purchased from the nearly bankrupt Brazilian government, both of the massive aircraft were now painted in the colors of a regional air-cargo company.
The standard aircraft fuel tanks were full, and the portable 3,600-gallon stainless steel tank in the cargo compartment had been filled to capacity with jet fuel.
Born in Yarmouk Camp in Damascus, Syria, the nineteen-year-old Tariq had grown up in better conditions than many refugees in the Middle East. One of the more than hundred thousand “forgotten Palestinians” ignored by the international media because they did not live under Israeli “occupation,” he had been educated in UNRWA schools. His father had worked at a local hospital; his mother had died in childbirth.
Though known as a “camp,” Yarmouk had schools, hospitals, and even internet cafés. During the Syrian Civil War, it had become the scene of intense fighting between the Free Syrian Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, backed by Syrian Army forces. Thousands of residents had fled the fighting. Eventually, the Syrian Army had besieged the camp, turning it into an utter hellhole.
When ISIS forces entered the camp, Tariq had finally fled to Lebanon, where he’d met dozens of other young men like himself, homeless, without a country, without a purpose, and eager for direction. One of these other men had been Wassim Nuwas, an Iraqi-born twenty-two-year-old who had also fled ISIS. The two men had met in a mosque favored by such angry, disaffected young men as they. Then came a well-dressed British man, who offered them a unique opportunity to vent their anger.
He had given them money, papers, and instructions to find passage on a cargo flight from Beirut to Cairo, and then to Borg El Arab to begin their training. Under the close tutelage of a Nigerian instructor pilot, they had received thirty-two hours of dual basic flight training in a Cessna 172, before transitioning to the Hercules. Tariq and Wassim had flown an additional fifteen hours and made eleven takeoffs but no landings in the big turboprops.
After receiving permission to taxi, Tariq steered behind an EgyptAir Boeing 737–800 headed for Runway One-Four. He watched the airliner take off and climb into the hazy gray sky. Cleared for takeoff, he lined up the big KC-130H with the runway and slowly added power to the four powerful Allison engines, feeling the adrenaline surge in his body. Today, he flew solo in the Hercules for the first time. His heart pounded wildly as anxiety filled him, but he managed to take off without incident, and started a slow climb to one thousand feet.
As the minutes passed, a sense of peacefulness descended over him. He followed the Mediterranean coast until reaching the northern end of the canal at Port Said, just as he had practiced with his instructor. Turning south, he followed the crowded waterway until he could see the US Navy warships just beyond the horizon.
He frowned, wishing he had been given permission to strike the carrier, but his handler had been adamant he must keep clear of the Americans, who would likely be on high alert.
Rolling to a southeasterly course, Tariq tried to give the carrier group a wide berth, before turning back to the canal at a point almost ten miles ahead of the American fleet. As he approached it, he saw a pair of fighter jets that had been circling over the carrier suddenly turning toward him.
Panicking, he pushed full throttle and pointed the plane at the closest target, a small merchant vessel — maybe a hundred feet long — less than a half mile away.
It will have to do, he thought, angry that he couldn’t go after the massive oil tankers a few miles farther south, but he couldn’t risk being shot down.
Lowering the nose, he entered a shallow dive as the jets approached. With the four powerful Allison turboprop engines producing more than 4,900 shaft horsepower each, the KC-130H accelerated to four hundred miles per hour as the bridge of the ship filled his windscreen.
The heavy plane vanished in a horrendous explosion that reverberated for miles and tore through the small ship with enough force to drive the keel three feet into the bottom of the canal. Debris rained down in a quarter-mile radius around the smoking wreckage, as southbound traffic began stopping in place.
Captain Bennett ordered his crew to general quarters only seconds after the explosion. Thick black smoke billowed skyward, but well ahead of his position. The other navy ships also went to general quarters, and all traffic stopped.
A pair of F/A-18Es reported having spotted a Hercules turboprop in its final suicide dive. The fighters, accompanied by another pair of Super Hornets that had been refueling from a KC-135 Stratotanker, scrambled into two sections flying CAP over the carrier searching for other rogue planes.
“What a damned mess,” Bennett mumbled before starting to make calls to back out of the canal and return to the Mediterranean.
Wassim saw the column of black smoke rising in the distance as he began looking for a target north of the US Navy ships but far away enough not to be an immediate threat.
Spotting a large petroleum tanker almost fifteen miles north of the convoy, he added full power to the straining engines and aimed for it, making minor corrections all the way down.
As the long deck of the tanker filled his windscreen, Wassim closed his eyes in prayer.
— 14 —
President Cord Macklin felt he had lost control. Each successful attack made the United States appear weaker, less able to defend herself. If the trend continued without a meaningful response from the United States, the enemies of America would take advantage. They would create a maelstrom of death and destruction both domestically and internationally that had the potential to cripple the ability of the US to respond to larger threats, such as a Chinese attack on Taiwan or a North Korean attack on South Korea, as well as strike fear into the world stock markets.
Macklin felt compelled to demonstrate his resolve and take control of this dire situation.
The Dow had lost 15 percent of its value since the attack on Truman and Stennis. And now Lincoln had been trapped in the Suez Canal by two kamikaze attacks.