CHAPTER 36: Taking the Bait
Slade was trapped and he knew it; worse the Iranians knew it. He wasn’t quite sure how he got himself into this jam, running into a dead end, but he did. Now he had dozens of Iranians between himself and the only exit and they had him pinned down.
What to do?
He was in the ceiling, invisible, that was his only advantage. The cooling pipes and electrical ducts hid him from view and deflected the almost constant AK-47 fire coming from only a few meters away. That was his only advantage. His little P90 was a good gun unless it had to be stacked against about a dozen AK’s; then, it just wasn’t enough.
What to do?
Slade tried every trick in the book: taunting, staying quiet, diversion — nothing worked. They gave him no opening to move or to escape. He had nothing left as far as ammunition; only his knife. Now, to make matters worse, it was getting hard to breathe. The Iranians were throwing up so much fire that the burnt gunpowder took up more air than, well, air.
Still they kept firing, and that, only that, was his salvation. Slade prayed, and after he finished an Our Father and three Hail Mary’s plus a Glory Be — glory be and halleluiah — he saw light come through the newest bullet holes in the ceiling.
“Who taught you ladies how to shoot?” he yelled in Farsi.
A hail of gunfire answered him, creating more light in the ceiling. The Iranians were actually throwing up so many 7.62 shells that they were shredding the steel plates in the floor above. That gave him an idea.
Taking out his tungsten rotary saw, Slade began cutting the deck between the holes, all the while egging the Iranians on.
“What’s the matter? Are your Burkas ruining your aim?”
It kept coming.
“Nikahd’s going to cut your balls off before he has you thrown to the sharks!”
Actually, Nikahd had already done just that to two men. Desperation mixed with fury. Slade could feel the barrels melting beneath him. Yet above him an entire section of the floor looked like Swiss cheese. In an eruption of energy he braced himself on the heavy steel pipe that had been protecting him and shoved hard, squatting the floor plates above him, crashing through the floor to the deck above.
Slade rolled off to the side as more bullets flew, but he wasn’t alone. Some enterprising Iranians had noticed the same thing he did. They’d climbed up to the next deck in order to shoot down through the floor at Slade. Only now he was right in their midst.
With surprise and animalistic fury on his side Slade and his knife made short work of the four Iranians who tried to surprise him. He couldn’t have recounted what he did, who he knifed first or where, it was all pure training and bestial instinct. Once finished he stood upon the trembling corpses of his kills, dully aware that bullets were thudding into the now dead bodies from below.
That irritated him.
Slade yanked grenades from the men’s vests and pulled their pins, tossing them down through the hole on the floor. Only when the screams and firing faded away with the drifting smoke did he stop.
That chore done he thought nothing more of it. He didn’t consider how close to death he’d been. He didn’t consider how fortune intervened to save him from his own stupid mistake. Slade simply re-armed himself and disappeared into the maze of the ship. The war continued.
Only later that evening after things died down did he realize that he’d been hit by ricochets and splinters. The firefight shredded his wetsuit and he had several bullets that penetrated through his skin. He plucked or dug them out, too worn out to feel pain, too desperate in his situation to care.
His only real concern was having to go into the water if the ship were torpedoed. If he bled that would attract sharks. Slade did not want to be eaten after all this, he really didn’t. He hunkered down in the safest place he could think of: on top of the bridge where he could keep an eye on things.
So it was that while an increasingly frustrated Nikahd directed the search for Slade, he was actually not more than a few meters away all the time.
The Galaxus continued to head east toward Jakarta, but it was no longer alone. The distress calls sent by Nikahd had their effect on the world at large. Few nations liked the United States. Jealousy had its affect but so did the inherent benevolence of the superpower; it was easy to hate a behemoth that for the most part refused to hit back. However, in a dangerous world, even fewer nations liked a weak United States — the beacon for freedom in the world simply could no longer be trusted. The Iranian freighter was now the underdog being threatened by a once benevolent giant.
World opinion turned decidedly against America to the point where a president who was once reluctant to act now steadfastly refused to do anything at all. More to the point freighters in the nearby area joined up with the Galaxus, forming a convoy to protect the freighter. The Key West had to submerge and now remained a hidden menace.
Slade saw all of this happening from his perch or heard it from the bridge bug. With growing frustration he realized the president wasn’t going to do anything about this. It looked as though only an act of God would stop the Iranians from delivering their deadly cargo to the waiting jihadists in Jakarta.
What was he going to do; he couldn’t sink the ship? The only answer was to destroy the Uranium. The problem was, of course, that it couldn’t be destroyed. He could theoretically disperse it by blowing it up. Short of that there was really nothing he could do. That was the whole point of sinking it before they reached Jakarta.
The only solution left was to take the ship.
That was obviously a possibility that Nikahd considered. Slade was forced off of his perch on the bridge because Nikahd put a machine gun nest up there as well as snipers. The cargo hold for the Uranium was likewise protected by a double ring of troops twenty-four hours a day.
Even if Slade had Killer and his Delta Force team it would be a hard, dangerous fight. He was in a quandary. As he put it to the director in his nightly communique — the Iranians stopped their jamming now that the world was interested in the plight of the Galaxus—Slade felt completely helpless. “I’m a hundred yards from the Uranium. It’s not a matter of finding it; it’s right there and I can’t figure out how to get to it.”
“Don’t get yourself killed yet Slade,” the director cautioned. “We’re not that desperate. We still have a few days.”
“Sir, I have one suggestion.”
“We need any ideas you have,” the director admitted.
“Rattle their cage. We’re trying to make it look like the Iranians are pulling a fast one; we’re trying to smear them and lessen their international power. Nikahd is gloating about turning the tables on us; let’s do it to him. Plant the bug in their ear that we really know those containers at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz are the real deal, but in order to de-stabilize Iran we’ve come up with this Galaxus scheme.”
The director caught on. “Let the international community handle the rest; they’ll demand we expedite the recovery of the containers, expecting to expose our duplicity once and for all. In reality they’ll blow the Iranian scheme wide open. That will force the president’s hand — Slade that’s good, very good — say, you’re not after my job are you?”
“Not under this president sir. I don’t have your self-control.”
“You’ve a point there,” Gann admitted. “I’ll be in contact — stay alive!”