Dale Brown - Satan’s Tail

‘Untie my hands, Red. Let me go after these bastards where they live. They don’t respect the law. Why should we? Let my ships go into territorial waters.’

‘Talk to the politicians,’ said Red. ‘Even Tex’ll back you on that.’

‘Untie my hands. That’s all I ask.’

‘That and an assault ship and half of the Navy’s Marines.’

‘I’ll take two platoons of Marines. With or without the ship.’

‘Where will you put them?’

‘Marines? I’ll give ’em a rubber raft and tell them that’s all they get until they take over one of the patrol boats. I’ll have the whole damn pirate fleet by nightfall.’

Fatigue stung Ali’s eyes as he walked up the gangplank to the large ship. He had not slept since the battle. It was not simply a matter of restlessness, or even the demands of his position. He feared that he would dream of his son the same way he had dreamed of his wife after her death. The dreams had been vivid and heart-wrenching; he could not face such an ordeal now.

The ship was nearly twice as long as his boats. Once part of the Russian navy, it had fallen into great disrepair after being delivered to Somalia as part of a deal the communists used to sway the corrupt government years before. The ship had fallen under the control of a warlord in Mogadishu, who had agreed to donate it to the Islamic cause in exchange for weapons and cash.

Rust stained the hull and the odor of rot hung heavy over the ship. Netting and fake spars had been strategically placed ahead of the forecastle to make the vessel look more like a merchant trawler from the air. Ali had no illusion that this would fool a discerning eye intent on discovering the ship; he merely wanted to make it easier to overlook.

‘Admiral Ali,’ said the ship’s captain, greeting him as he came aboard. ‘It is a pleasure, sir.’

‘I am not an admiral,’ Ali told him.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the captain. He led the way around the deck of the ship, showing Ali to the bridge.

‘I wish to see the engines,’ said Ali.

‘The engine room,’ said the captain doubtfully. When Ali did not respond, the captain dutifully led him to a ladder and they descended into the bowels of the ship. The stench of rot increased as they went down; the way was dark and the passages narrow. Ali noticed several sets of pipes and wires that were broken, and there were bits of the decking that seemed as if a shark had bitten through.

In truth, the engine room was not as bad as he expected when he saw the captain’s frown. Water slopped along the floor, but it was less than an inch. The massive 40 DM diesels seemed clean enough, and while the space smelled of diesel oil, Ali had been on several ships in the Egyptian navy that were much worse. There were two men on duty, one of whom did not speak Arabic – a Polish engineer familiar with the engines whom the captain had somehow found and managed to hire.

‘He is, unfortunately, a drinker,’ said the captain as they went back topside. ‘But he knows the engines.’

‘You have done very well getting the ship here,’ said Ali. ‘But you have much more work to do.’

‘I understand, Captain.’

‘We will obtain the missiles in a few days. How long will it take you to install them?’

Ali listened as the ship’s commander told him that he had two men trained by the Russians to work with the systems, and several others willing to work with them. This neither answered the question nor impressed Ali.

‘Two brothers from Egypt will join you tomorrow and help with the work,’ Ali told the captain. ‘They will help you determine how much additional laborers are needed. One of my men will install a radio system with an encryption system.’

‘Thank you, Captain.’

Ali nodded. ‘We need a name.’ The vessel looked the opposite of a warship, and giving it a warlike name would be an affront, he thought. It needed something nobler. ‘Sharia.’

The word meant ‘Islamic law’ in Arabic. It was the only true law, the law that would be restored when the jihad was won.

‘It is a good name. Fitting.’

‘Make sure your crew does not embarrass it,’ said Ali, turning to go back to the dock.

Breanna put the aircraft into a wide turn over the desert to the east of Khamis Mushait, waiting for the ground controllers to decide that she was cleared to land. The other Megafortress, Wisconsin, had landed ten minutes ago. It wasn’t clear what the hang-up was, since there were no other aircraft visible on the ramps or anywhere near the runway.

The city looked like a clump of dirty sugar cubes and miniature plastic trees stuck in a child’s sandbox. Yellowish brown sand stretched toward the horizon, as if the desert were marching toward the city and not the other way around. This was actually a relatively populous area of the country, with highways that had existed for centuries as trade routes and cities that had been shady oases before the Pharaohs built the pyramids. But from the air the land looked sparse and even imaginary.

‘What do we do if we don’t get cleared in?’ asked Lieutenant Mark ‘Spiderman’ Hennemann, her copilot.

‘Then we launch our Flighthawk, have Zen take out the tower, and settle down right behind him,’ she said.

The copilot didn’t laugh. ‘Bree?’

‘I’m kidding,’ she told him. ‘If you’re going to fly with me, Spiderman, you better get a sense of humor.’

‘I’m working on it,’ he said, as serious as if she had told him to review a flight plan or procedure.

Breanna began to laugh.

‘Did I miss another joke?’ asked Spiderman.

‘Never mind. See if you can get a hold of Colonel Bastian on the ground and find out what i hasn’t been dotted.’

‘Will do.’ Spiderman punched the flat-panel touch-screen at the right side of his dashboard. ‘We have about fifteen minutes of fuel left.’

‘Looks like that’s how long they have to decide whether we’re allowed to land or not.’

The Saudis took nearly all of them before not one but two officers came on offering their ‘most sincere and humble apologies’ and directing the Megafortress to land. Breanna brought the plane in quickly, setting the big jet down on the ample runway. She found a powder-blue Saudi Royal Air Force car waiting as she approached the far end of the runway; the car led them past a group of Saudi F-15s to the far end of the base. Well-armed Saudi soldiers were clustered around a pair of trucks parked at the side of the ramp. An Air Force advance security team had been sent down from Europe and was waiting near the revetment where they were led.

‘Ah, home sweet home,’ said Breanna as she and her copilot began shutting down the aircraft after parking.

Dog took another slug from the bottle of mineral water. He felt as dry as the desert outside, even though he’d already finished two liter bottles since landing. Commander Delaford, meanwhile, poked at the large map they had mounted on the wall of the command center the Saudis had loaned them. The facilities – built less than a year before and never used – combined living and work quarters and could have fit at least two squadrons if not more. And they weren’t little rooms either – this one was about three times the size of Dog’s entire office suite. His small team was clustered around a table that could have accommodated the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and their assistants.

‘The problem is,’ continued Delaford, ‘the best place to launch the Piranha probe to guarantee that it won’t be spotted going in is in this area here, well off the Somalian coast and a good distance from the shipping lanes. But that puts it six hundred miles from the most likely places for the submarine to be. At forty knots, that’s fifteen hours of swim time before the probe starts doing anything worthwhile.’