Stephen Coonts: Pirate Alley

As violence goes, garroting ranks right up there with slashing with a cutlass. To be good with a garroting wire you have to like the weapon. You must like pulling with all your strength on the handles and feeling the victim buck and writhe helplessly as the wire cuts into his throat, then slices into his jugular veins, severing them. The lack of air would eventually kill the victim, a strangulation, but the loss of blood to the brain brings an almost instantaneous unconsciousness. The victim never wakes up.

The trick is to keep tightening the wire after the victim passes out. Tighten until it cuts the veins. It helps if the man pulling on the handles is strong, with well-developed shoulders and back muscles. Bullet Bob was. He was only a few inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than the Somali male, but he was twice as strong. It wasn’t a fair contest. It was a quick, silent assassination.

When the blood erupted from the holy warrior’s neck, Quinn lowered him to the floor. Pulled his wire off and wiped it on the back of the man’s filthy shirt in a place the blood had yet to reach. Then he moved on.

The SEAL lieutenant was on the bridge, hidden in the doorway of the navigator’s office, when he heard a man come along the starboard passageway and pass through the open door. Sure enough, he saw the big machine gun lying there on the floor immediately and stepped toward it to take a look. As he passed the open door, Quinn stepped out behind him, grabbed his mouth with his left hand and cut his throat with his right. The fighting knife slashed through tissue as if it were soft cheese.

Quinn stepped back into the office and waited. Sure enough, within less than a minute another Somali came exploring. He saw the first guy lying on the deck in a pool of his own blood and stopped. This put him about six feet from the doorway. Quinn launched himself toward the man, with his knife swinging. The swipe caught muscle, tissue, tendons and cartilage; blood erupted from the man’s neck. His eyes glazed and he tumbled to the deck, unconscious and bleeding out.

Five minutes after they came aboard, it was all over. All six were dead. One of the SEALs skinned out of his clothes, donned a dead man’s, grabbed his AK and went on deck to wave off the two circling boats.

Quinn watched. It was a necessary gamble.

It paid off. The boats moved off to the other ships.

Bullet Bob went up a deck to the e-com center. Noon was fairly well pickled, his usual late-afternoon condition, and Rosen was working on his e-mails. Neither knew the Shabab warriors had come aboard, and Quinn didn’t tell them.

“We’re going to have to get ashore before the darkness becomes too thick,” Noon said. “I must signal for our boat.”

“Plan on staying aboard tonight,” Quinn said. “If the boat comes, we’ll wave them off.”

“I wonder if the cruise line would mind if we helped ourselves to some of their fine cuisine?”

Rosen turned off the computer. “I know where the peanut butter is, and if the bread hasn’t spoiled…”

The SEALs were in the kitchen and had a simple dinner prepared when Quinn came in with Rosen and Noon. The two ship’s engineers were already there, drinking their pints, celebrating their return from belowdecks. They looked happy and serene; no doubt they would get happier and more serene if they kept swilling the beer.

The last of the light was fading from the sky.

Quinn checked his watch, then said to Finnorn and the others, “You guys get that gun mounted on the bridge. Show starts in two hours and five minutes. While you are going that way, throw those corpses over the side.”

Rosen stopped forking food. “Corpses?”

“We had uninvited guests. They are on their way to Paradise. Or Hell. Allah will figure it out.”

* * *

As the light faded completely, I switched to night-vision goggles. I had everyone located, I hoped. There were the six pickups, all in the plaza, all illuminated by the evening fire. No women or children around, just men, and all armed. They were roasting something in the fire … If there was a pickup on the far side of the building, I couldn’t see it from my vantage point.

The generator was running again, powering lights in every room. I got glimpses of people in the penthouse, two visible on the second floor … a couple guys on the balcony with rifles, walking around looking things over.

I could see two machine guns mounted on the roof. They were the belt-fed 7.62 mm Russian models that were in all the pickups. These two must have been carried up from the weapons horde in the basement.

When the night was as dark as the inside of a black cat, I pointed out my route to E.D., who wasn’t talkative. “Don’t shoot unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you do shoot, don’t miss.”

He grunted.

My leg had stiffened up. Oh, man, that thing was sore.

I crawled forward.

* * *

Aboard Chosin Reservoir, Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington was watching the action unfold on computer screens. Real-time video and infrared presentations from three drones over Eyl played on monitors. SEALs were in the water and approaching the Eyl beaches. Marines were landing on the beaches above and below the town in armored personnel carriers. They had some light artillery and plenty of machine guns with them. Three Ospreys carrying SEALs were orbiting high over the Eyl airport. They would parachute into the airport and help Tommy Carmellini’s snatch team secure the place after the CIA operatives had taken out as many of the defenders as possible. Carmellini’s team would attack at the airport at the same time SEALs crawling onto the beach assaulted Ragnar’s old lair, the move that would open the ball. Thirty minutes prior to the assault, F/A-18s and F-35s would launch from the aircraft carrier seventy-five miles offshore; they would be overhead with plenty of ordnance, should it become necessary.

The whole plan was overkill: the naval intelligence professionals thought the Shabab around Eyl had at the most 150 men, and probably less after last night’s battle. Tarkington was hitting the place with enough firepower to destroy a division. Simply, he could not be certain that Grafton and his Mossad colleagues had managed to disarm the detonators for the trench bomb. He needed to hit the Shabab with overwhelming force, take them down within seconds, and make any resistance impossible. Tarkington was trying to save lives-the hostages in the fort and the marines and SEALs.

He had had several satellite conversations during the day with his boss, the fleet commander, the Pentagon and the White House. All offered advice, no one issued orders. It was a military miracle, Toad thought. Yet there are two sides to the total responsibility coin: Screw this up and you alone take the fall.

“Swarm them,” he told Sal Molina at the White House this evening, “and we’ll have minimum casualties. Piddle around and it’s going to be a mess.”

“Why don’t you just blow up Ragnar’s building with missiles?” the president had asked. “Obliterate it.”

“That was the original plan, sir, but Admiral Grafton is being held hostage in there. So I’ve changed the plan.”

“I see,” the president said thoughtfully. What he meant was, his hands were clean. If Grafton or any of our guys get killed, I’ll give them a medal. Spend an hour in the East Room in front of cameras holding hands with the widows.

Politics. It was enough to gag a maggot.

Toad wasn’t betting everything on the initial assault. He had every destroyer in Task Force 151 in a trail formation, one behind the other, ready to steam just off the beach and shell any target. He had every marine in the MEU on alert to go ashore as fast as helicopters and Ospreys could get them there. He had airborne ordnance from the aircraft carrier USS United States that could be delivered in a continuous stream as fast as the carrier’s crew could work the flight deck and rearm the planes. Finally, all the destroyers and both cruisers had targets selected for their Harpoon missiles.