“Only to thank her crew and our warriors, Brigadier. Men and boys alike.”
The oil-handling pier extended into the harbor from the southern breakwater, roughly seven hundred yards from the breakwater’s shoreward root. Leaving the cluster of staff and command cars at the base of the pier, the Premier General and his chief of staff strode out along it, Umamgi hastening to stay close enough to share in the approbation.
The troopers of the bodyguard force moved watchfully with Belewa’s party, not that the General felt much at risk this day. It had been a long time since Belewa had been able to give his people good news. They were hungry for it, and they cheered him as he passed through the waiting crowd, the deprivations and uncertainties of the past few months forgotten for the moment. Belewa waved and shook hands and found himself smiling.
Turning out of the central channel, the tanker stood in toward the oiling pier, its attendant tug nuzzling it slowly closer. A few minutes more and it would be within casting range of the mooring lines. The mixed Union and Algerian crew manning the rails joined in the cheering.
And then over the raised voices and blaring jincajou music, Belewa heard another sound, a hard-edged nasal whine growing rapidly in volume. He looked up just in time to see a winged and finned cigar shape flash a few hundred feet over head, angling inland. A corner of Belewa’s warrior’s mind reacted analytically.
American SeaSLAM missile. Extended Response variant. Sea and air launched. Precision guidance. Land attack…
Then the missile was past and the shock wave of a powerful explosion slapped across the crowd, turning cheers to screams. A quarter of a mile away, a mushroom of smoke rose above the harbor breakwater. Belatedly, air raid sirens began to scream.
“Down!” Belewa bellowed. “Everyone get down and stay down! Brigadier Atiba! With me!” With his chief of staff and security trailing behind, Belewa ran for his staff car, sidestepping Ambassador Umamgi, who lay cowered on the pier decking.
The only casualties were a couple of lightly wounded members of an army security patrol, and overtly, the damage appeared minor. A shallow crater blasted in the heavy stone of the causeway, lightly damaging the access road that ran atop it. However, it was obvious that the impact point had carefully been centered on the petroleum-transfer pipelines that paralleled the access road. A twenty-foot gap had been torn out of the system, and other pipe sections above and below the target had been shrapnel riddled and wrenched out of alignment.
By the time Belewa and his entourage arrived at the scene, the port’s fire brigade had extinguished the few smoldering pools of spilled residual oil. There had been only one missile launched, and only this one target struck.
“Brigadier Atiba, get the harbor fully secured,” Belewa snapped as he dismounted from the Land Rover. “Get all undesignated civilians out of the area. And get the manager of the port oil facilities out here immediately!”
“He’s on his way now, General,” the Chief of Staff replied, pointing to a battered jeep tearing up the causeway from the tank farm.
Standing beside the staff car, Belewa gave the tank farm manager and his chief engineer an impatient five minutes to assess the damage before summoning them over. “How bad?” he demanded.
The director could only shake his head. “What is there to say, General? Both the eight-inch and the twelve-inch transfer lines are cut. We can’t unload until they are repaired.”
“Could we unload the fuel from the tanker directly into the disbursement convoys?”
The director considered for a moment before shaking his head again. “Something could be rigged, I suppose, but it would be like draining a lake through a straw. It would take weeks to off-load that tanker using portable pumps. It will be easier and faster to repair the transfer lines.”
“How long?”
“It doesn’t look too bad, General. A day. Two at the most.”
“Twenty-four hours from now, those pipelines will be repaired and that tanker will be unloading. Is that understood? Twenty-four hours!”
The chill in Belewa’s voice rendered any answer except “Yes, sir” extremely unwise.
Belewa allowed the suddenly sweating tank farm director to proceed with his urgent task. As Belewa turned away, he noted a piece of crumpled aluminum lying at his feet. Picking it up, he brushed the dust from its scorched, gray-painted surface and read the dark blue stenciling upon it: U.S. NAV.
He had been a fool to even dream of a victory. Not while the Leopard lived. He had thrown her off for a moment, yet she was already springing back upon him, her fangs still reaching for his throat.
“Brigadier Atiba! I want every man and every gun we’ve got available pulled back into the Monrovia defenses! Everything! Now!”
With her upperworks blackened by booster exhaust, the Queen of the West surged up Floater 1’s docking ramp. Her squadron sisters, Carondelet and Manassas, were already in their hangar slots, their service crews swarming around them.
“Swarming” was an apt collective description of the entire platform. “All hands on deck” had been called, and the base complement was hard at work dealing with the intensifying barrage of orders that had been flowing in from the task force flag craft.
Amanda found the briefing trailer crowded upon her entry. As per her command, all senior officers and NCOs of the seafighter squadron, Fox company, and the platform service force were present. Videoconferencing links had also been established with the U.S. command cadre at Conakry Base. Also linked in were the captains of both the Santana and Sirocco, the two Patrol Craft already having been ordered to leave their stations and close with Floater 1 at their best possible speed.
Amanda worked her way forward to the head of the briefing table. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she began quietly, turning to face her silent and intent audience. “The one thing we have the least of at this moment is time, so we’ll get right to it. I know you all have been advised on the current situation. The West African Union has broken the blockade. They’ve gotten an oil tanker through.
“If they succeed in unloading and dispersing this tanker’s cargo, we’re right back to where we were six months ago. All of our efforts, all of our sacrifices, all of the blood spilled during this operation will have been for nothing. I do not intend to see this happen.”
She scanned the faces of her officers, looking for any sign of a broken will or any hint of lingering distrust in her. Either could be disastrous during the next twenty-four hours. The structure she had tried to build here off the Gold Coast was about to face its ultimate test.
“On my own authority and personal responsibility, I have taken action to prevent the unloading of the tanker… for perhaps a day. Within that time frame, we have to develop, organize, and launch an operation to prevent the West African Union from acquiring these new oil reserves. We are not going to be able to wait around for outside help to arrive. We will have to go with the resources we have available to us right now. We will also have to launch this operation into the face of a fully alerted and mobilized enemy. You may rest assured that the Union will be waiting for us with everything they’ve got.”
She scanned the room once more. She heard only the purr of the air conditioner and the creak of a chair. After a moment, Stone Quillain broke the silence.
“What’s the game plan, Skipper?”