Chet unfastened the mooring line, put a key in the ignition, set the throttle, and pulled on the starter cord. The engine caught, and off we went. But where were we going?
The only seat in the open boat was in the stern near the engine, and that’s where Chet sat and steered. The rest of us sat on overturned white plastic buckets. The boat smelled fishy, and our bare feet were submerged in about four inches of nasty bilgewater.
Also, not to complain, but the sun was starting to burn my exposed skin, and I could see that Buck, Kate, and Brenner were getting a little lobsterish as well. A more immediate concern was that our guns and commo were back on the beach.
Chet Morgan, I concluded, was crazy. And we were following him. That didn’t make us crazy; it made us stupid.
There were a few rocks sticking out of the water, and on one of the rocks stood a large black-and-white gull. As we got within fifty feet of the rock, Chet reached under his shirt into the small of his back, pulled a.40 caliber Glock, took aim, and popped off a round at the big bird. Kate, who hadn’t seen Chet pull his gun, was startled; the rest of us were astonished, and Chet was annoyed because he missed. The bird flew away.
To make him feel better, I said, “To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.”
Chet ignored that and informed us, “That was a masked booby gull.” He assured us, “Not endangered.”
I remarked, “And never will be with shooting like that.”
I thought Chet was going to shoot me, but he laughed-a real laugh, which almost made me think he wasn’t nuts. He said, “I’d never shoot a white-eyed gull. They’re endangered. And they bring good luck.”
Whatever you say, Chet. Now put the gun away.
But he put it on the seat beside him. Well, at least one of us had a gun. Unfortunately, it was the crazy guy.
Chet glanced up at Elephant Rock, and I followed his gaze. The Yemeni Army guys in the pickup truck had swung their heavy machine gun toward us, and one of the soldiers was looking at us with binoculars.
Chet commented, “They get jumpy when they hear gunfire.”
Me, too.
He said to us, “If we have time, I’ll take you shark fishing. I have good luck nearly every time I go out.” He smiled and said to me and Brenner, “The sharks almost got lucky when you went out.” He laughed.
So, here we were on a small boat with an armed psychopath. How do I get myself in these situations? I need to check my contract.
I glanced at Brenner, who I knew was thinking what I was thinking. Kate, too, seemed a bit unsure about Mr. Morgan, but she has a history of giving CIA nut jobs the benefit of the doubt. Up to a point. Then she shoots them. Well… only one so far.
Buck had a dopey smile on his face, and I knew he had a lot of tolerance for screwy behavior as long as the screwball was a colleague and a peer. I mean, I had the feeling, based partly on their preppy accents, that Buck and Chet had gone to the same schools or similar schools and came from the same social stratum. Chet was the bad-boy frat brother who was always on double-secret probation, and everyone loved him as long as he didn’t actually get anyone killed. Later in life, however, what had been funny and zany behavior progressed into something less entertaining.
Also, with these CIA guys, they all cultivated eccentric behavior, which became part of their self-created legend. They wanted their peers to tell stories about them and to spread the word of their unique flamboyance.
Kate’s aforementioned pal, Ted Nash, was a good example of all this. Plus Ted was an arrogant prick. But now he was dead, and you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Even if they were assholes. Which brought me to another thought: Did Chet Morgan know Ted Nash? Probably. But this wasn’t the time to ask.
Anyway, Chet Morgan had set the stage for his entry into the show, and as they say in the theater world, if you show a gun in the first act, you need to use it in the final act.
We rounded the peninsula and Chet set a course for the middle of Aden Harbor. I knew where we were going.
We sailed into the setting sun for about ten minutes, then Chet killed the engine but didn’t drop anchor, and the boat drifted out with the tide.
Chet said, “This is where the Cole was moored.”
I informed him, “I’ve been here.”
He nodded.
In fact, nearly everyone who worked this case had been taken out to this spot where seventeen American sailors had been murdered.
Chet lit another cigarette and stared into the blue water. He said, “The USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, under the command of Commander Kirk Lippold, sailed into Aden Harbor for a routine refueling. The mooring was completed at nine-thirty A.M., and refueling started at ten-thirty.”
Everyone knew this, but this is the way you begin-at the beginning.
Chet continued, “At around eleven-twenty, a small craft, like this one, with two men aboard-two suicide bombers-approached the port side of the destroyer. A minute or two later, the small craft exploded, putting a forty-by-forty-foot hole in the side of the armored hull.” He added, “It’s estimated that four to seven hundred pounds of TNT and RDX were used.” He asked rhetorically, “Where the hell did they get that much high-grade explosive?”
The answer was, just about anywhere these days. The real question had to do with the two Al Qaeda guys who woke up that morning knowing they were going to die. They worked hard to load the boat with the explosives that were going to kill them, then sailed the boat into the sunny harbor. I sort of pictured them watching the gulls flying overhead, and I wondered what they said to each other or what they were thinking in the last few minutes of their lives.
“Asymmetric warfare,” Chet said. “A small boat like this one, worth maybe a few hundred dollars, two guys who probably had no military training, and they crippled a billion-dollar, sixty-eight-hundred-ton state-of-the-art warship, built to take on any enemy warship in the world. Except the boat that attacked them.” He flipped his cigarette over the side and said, “Fucking amazing. Fucking ridiculous.”
Fucking right.
“And how were they able to do this?” asked Chet, and answered his own question. “Because the Navy’s Rules of Engagement were rewritten by some committee of politically correct, ball-less wonders in the bowels of the Pentagon.”
Right. Worse yet, the Cole’s crew and commander actually followed the new Rules of Engagement. I wouldn’t have. But I’m not military.
Chet informed us, “For hundreds of years, naval rules called for challenging an approaching ship by voice or signal to identify itself. If the ship keeps coming, you sound the alarm for battle stations and fire a shot across its bow. And if it still keeps coming, you blow it the hell out of the water.” He reminded us, “The Cole did none of that, even though this is known as a potentially hostile port. They let an unidentified ship come alongside, right here, and blow them up.” He added, “Because internationally recognized rules of the sea had been changed, for no reason except political correctness.”
The only good news is that the Navy has re-evaluated its new, sensitive Rules of Engagement after seventeen men died on the Cole, and we’ve all re-evaluated the rules of war after 9/11. As for poor Commander Lippold, he was officially exonerated of any fault-he was just following stupid rules-but unofficially his career was finished and he was passed over for promotion and retired. I’ll bet he wished he had that ten minutes to live over again.
Chet continued, “To make this attack even more incomprehensible, Al Qaeda had tried the very same thing nine months earlier in January of 2000 as part of the millennium attack plots.” He reminded us, “The USS The Sullivans, right here in Aden Harbor. A refueling stop, just like the Cole. A boat approached The Sullivans, but it was so overloaded with explosives that it sank before it reached the ship.”