The SEALs assumed positions behind objects on deck to provide covering fire as the FAST Marines now fell onto the deck on the port and starboard sides. Another FAST squad was, Buford knew, hitting the bow. Buford was on the stern deck. His view of the bow was obscured by the smoke from the smoldering conning tower of the tanker. The Javelins had done a good job.
“Blue squad, join up with Gold. We’ll go below to find the auxiliary controls in the engine room,” he yelled into his headset. “Green, Red, join up with the FAST and go down amidships, look for booby traps and timers, any sign that someone is trying to blow up the ship.” Then he transferred all tactical control to the FAST team leader, a Marine captain. Once he went below, there was little probability that his radio would be able to transmit more than a few feet.
He pulled open a hatch and realized that the lights were out inside the ship. He pulled down his nightscope, and using hand signs, Buford and his squad entered the ship. He tried to remember the deck plans from his laptop. The two squads moved below down a darkened companionway. They descended three decks, providing cover for one another as they moved, just as they had drilled so many times.
He opened the hatch into the corridor. If he remembered correctly, the second door on the left would be the auxiliary helm control room, and from there the ship could be steered. According to the data he had read on the laptop as the Zodiac bounced out to the Jamal, this ship also had two emergency mini-propellers amidships. He wanted to deploy them and throw them to full throttle in reverse.
Buford and the rest of Gold squad found the door and assumed their positions to go through it together, high and low, covering one another. He pulled down the latch handle, and in a second they were in. “No shoot, no shoot,” an Asian man in a T-shirt screamed. Buford saw no one else in the room through his night-vision goggles.
“Are you from the Jamal’s crew?” Buford yelled as he placed his weapon to the Asian’s chest. The terrified man nodded affirmatively. “Where are the midship props and rudder controls?” Buford barked.
The Asian’s hand went out to a switch. “No!” Buford screamed, and knocked him away. The SEAL wanted to see the controls for himself. It looked fairly user-friendly and intuitive. Everything was marked in Japanese and English.
“This should do it,” he said to the rest of his squad as he hit a button that deployed the mini-props. Then he dialed in full reverse. “It will at least stop what’s left of the forward motion and in a few minutes it’ll start slipping her backwards. Now let’s start looking for explosives.”
The young SEAL lieutenant grabbed the quivering Asian ship’s crewman by the T-shirt and threw him back into the chair in front of the console, exactly where he had been sitting when the SEALs burst in. “Where are they? Where are the terrorists?” Buford screamed at the frightened sailor. “Tell me now!”
Almost in answer, a shape moved in the dark. From behind a file cabinet the sound of gunfire exploded in the little control room. Above it, Buford heard a shout: “Allah ahkbar!” He swung to his right, beginning to raise his weapon as he took three rounds into his body armor, one above the other. Then one pierced the skin at the top of his nose and his head exploded as his body fell backward onto the control panel.
Fire from two SEALs in the control room cut the gunman in two. With the sound of the weapons exchange causing his ears to ring and his nostrils to fill with acrid smoke, a SEAL hit the transmit button on his chin microphone. “Gold One is down. KIA, repeat Gold One KIA.” No one on deck could hear the signal through the steel of the hull.
Still hogging the bartender’s binoculars and juggling them with her cell phone, pressed against the window glass at the Top of the Corniche, Kate Delmarco was dictating to a CNN news anchor in Atlanta. She had been at it for half an hour, her reports also turning into bulletins that the Associated Press was running on its global network.
“The helicopters are still hovering above the deck and are scanning below with really bright spotlights. The troops from the helicopters have been on the deck now for almost ten minutes, but I can’t make them out. The fire seems to have gone out in the tower thing.” She squinted. “And I’d say the ship is definitely dead in the water. A lot of little ships are now around it and I can see the lights of more on the way. One has a blue, like a police light, spinning…. The fighter planes are still circling higher up. I can’t confirm the report that the American base was evacuated, but this huge liquid natural gas tanker definitely was headed that way, and had it been exploded by terrorists, thousands would have died, Americans and Bahrainis. I must stress that we do not know the identity of the terrorist group yet, despite rumors that may have appeared.”
The bartender, who had never before had such a high tipper as this American woman, hung up his telephone behind the bar and wrote a note on a napkin. He walked around the bar to the window and placed the napkin in front of Delmarco. It read, “Man from hospital call you. He say shokran jazeelan. Just tell you shokran.”
No, Kate thought, as tears welled up in her eyes. Thank you very much, Doctor, thank you.
Across town, in a small office on the intensive care ward at the Salmaniyah Medical Center, Dr. Rashid was composing an encrypted e-mail to his brother, Abdullah, in Riyadh
… although the Iranians may try to manufacture evidence. Those the Americans captured on the tanker are Iraqi Shiites, who should lead them to the Iranian Qods Force involvement.
The American newspaper reporter I met at Nakeel’s suggestion, she was how I told the Americans about the attack in time for them to stop it. She will say Islamyah was not involved in the attack, in fact helped to stop it.
I think they will believe her. Nakeel said she has good sources in the military and intelligence. I must ask Nakeel how he knows her. Sometimes, Abdullah, I wonder about our friend Nakeel and how he knows so much if he just develops real estate. For now, at least, we have stopped Tehran from staging a major massacre of Americans and blaming it on us. But, I am sure, they will not stop. There will be more. In your service, Ahmed.
5
“It gives me the willies just to be in this place, Pammy,” Brian Douglas confided to Pamela Braithwaite, executive assistant to the Director of SIS. “I’d be afraid to work in a glass palace like this, it’s just too vulnerable.”
“Yes, well, you’ll recall, or maybe you won’t, Brian, you were in the Dhofar with the Omanis, I do believe, running ops into the Yemen looking for al Qaeda back in 2000 when it happened”—Pamela shut her eyes to remember the scene—“when a Russian antitank missile came crashing into the eighth floor here. The Irish. Made a terrible mess, we moved everyone off the floor for three months. Now, of course, we have surveillance cameras throughout the neighborhood and police boats on the Thames….”