The Aden Effect (38 page)

Golzari called for two of the mercs to join him and ordered the others to break off in teams of two and spread out. He wouldn't make the same mistake the pirates in Old Mar'ib had made.

When Golzari and the other teams had closed to within a hundred yards, AK-47 fire erupted from the hilltop. The only structures nearby were a small stone house and a shed; a couple and several children ran out of the house at the sound of the gunshots. Golzari ordered one team to use the shed twenty yards away as cover and had his own team turn over an old oil drum to use as a step up to the roof of the house. One by one they climbed up, dropped to a prone position, and set the barrels of their weapons along the roof edge. Golzari directed the third team to support his left flank.

He saw two of Asha's men bolt from the vehicle and charge at the team of Highland mercs off to the far left. The mercs dropped to the ground and trained their weapons on the oncoming attackers, who advanced firing. One went down, then another. The mercs were cool customers, he thought. Stark had hired the right people. That left only Asha and three others.

When the captain didn't answer his call, Bobby raced to the CO's cabin one deck below, holding onto the railings midway down and letting his legs fly over the steps. His rapid knocks got a response.

“Come!”

Bobby entered the stateroom and said breathlessly, “Sir, RSO just called in concerned about the three men coming aboard and said he hadn't been informed and needed to check them out.”

“RSO? The embassy guy? I don't think so, mister. This is my ship. What the RSO doesn't realize is that we do this all the time. These are just some locals who want to try to sell us trinkets. Shouldn't you be on the bridge, Ensign?”

“Yes, sir, but the RSO said . . .”

“Is the RSO your commanding officer, Ensign Fisk?”

“No, sir,”
but it wouldn't be a bad idea
.

“Then get back there. I need to get to the wardroom and greet our local dignitaries.”

“But, sir, this is a force protection issue in coordination with an embassyled humanitarian operation. We are required to comply, sir.”

The captain pulled himself to his full height of five feet six inches. His face was growing dangerously red. “How dare you question me.”

“Sir, I am not questioning you, but there is an immediate force protection concern issue raised by the RSO. I will not allow them to board until they've been vetted.”

“
You
won't allow them on
my
ship?” The captain was spewing saliva in his rage. “You're relieved of duty.” In his peripheral vision Bobby saw three sailors who had emerged from one of the shacks in response to the shouting.

“No, sir. I'm going to tell the XO and sheriff not to let them board until the RSO has checked them.” Bobby turned his back to the captain and was about to head below toward the wardroom when the captain shouted to the sailors, “Stop him!”

Bobby felt a hand grab his khaki cloth belt. Two other pairs of hands took him by each arm. He struggled to pull himself free. “Let me go! This is an emergency!”

“Hold him here until he cools down.” The captain smirked at Bobby. “Your career was very short, Ensign. You won't be a problem to any other captain, I promise you. After I greet our visitors below I'm putting you off the ship. Let the embassy RSO on the island help you.” The captain proceeded below.

A minute later Bobby felt the sailors' grips begin to relax. He stood perfectly still until the first sailor released his grip on Bobby's belt, then wrenched his arms out of the hands of the other sailors and bolted away from them toward the wardroom two decks below and half the ship's length away.

The three visitors sat directly across from the XO, OPS, CHENG, and the command master chief as the other officers and chiefs settled into chairs around them. The youngest of the three, a man whose face was dripping sweat, sat quietly, understanding little of what was said in this room where the Navy officers ate.

His best opportunity would come when the captain entered. He planned to wait for that.

The patrol sector east of Socotra was mostly quiet, though the helo's occupants saw numerous small and large fishing boats. A cluster of ships to the north, just over the horizon from Hadiboh, caught Stark's attention. At the center of the cluster was one of the offshore support vessels that routinely plied these waters, though it was one of the larger ones he had seen. Closer inspection revealed two smaller OSVs nearby, each towing half a dozen skiffs. He also noticed a helicopter on the deck of the large OSV. The helicopter's rotors began to spin.

“What's that ship's speed and heading?” he said into the mike, shouting to be heard over the sound of the Seahawk's rotors.

“Three knots and heading into the wind,” Air Boss, the mission's pilot, responded.

“How far are we from Hadiboh?”

“Thirty nautical miles.”

“Boss, I need to talk with the TAO.”

“Stand by, Commander. Go.”

“TAO, DATT. Be advised we may have some pirate mother ships and skiffs approximately thirty nautical miles north of you. They also have a helo about to take off.”

“DATT, TAO. Understood. Will advise the CO immediately.”

“Roger that. Boss, can we get a closer look?”

“I'd love to oblige, Commander, but we need to refuel. We're taking photos of the ship cluster now and relaying them back to the ship.”

The XO had been watching the three men closely while she waited for the captain to arrive and get this ridiculous meeting under way. The youngest man, who was sweating profusely, was playing with a piece of metal on his primitive life vest. His eyes met hers. She saw him unscrew the safety cap and pull the lanyard.

The XO pushed away her chair and dove over the table in courageous desperation, knowing as she slid across the polished surface that it was too late.
“Bomb!” she cried out, hoping a last-second warning would save some of her shipmates.

The young man stood and yelled, “Allahu Akbar!” as the four five-hundred-gram bricks of TNT concealed in his life vest caused a percussive explosion that ripped apart half of the men and women in the wardroom. The captain, coming down the passageway toward the wardroom, was slammed against a bulkhead by the blast.

Batwing 57 circled the
Bennington
once at two thousand feet before making its landing approach. Connor settled back and looked down at the starboard side of the 10,000-ton cruiser just as smoke and flames shot from two portholes like water out of a fire hydrant. The deck of the great ship bulged upward. Those portholes could only have been the wardroom.

“Holy fuck!” Air Boss yelled through the headphones.

“It's the wardroom, Boss. Gas explosion from the galley?” came the copilot's voice.

“We aren't landing until we find out.”

Bobby ran into one of the sailors making his way down from the helo deck.

“Some kind of explosion, sir. It's bad!” the sailor shouted. “Whatever just happened below buckled our deck.”

Bobby got on the STC-2—the internal ship's phone—and told the bridge to have the quartermaster send out damage control parties.

The quartermaster's voice boomed immediately from the loudspeakers: “All hands, this is the bridge, we have an explosion of unknown cause. Damage control teams report immediately to officers' country.”

The confusion began in earnest as Bobby reached the VIP quarters. Damage control was trying to break through the hatch that led to officers' country—the place where he slept, ate, studied, and, along with every other junior officer, complained. Two corpsmen rushed by carrying the blood-covered captain. Bobby couldn't tell if he was dead or alive. At the very least he was unconscious and bleeding from head and torso lacerations.

“One, two, three!” the big boatswain's mate commanded as the work party pulled the hatch away and tried to force their way inside. Collapsed bulkheads and galley equipment blown off its moorings blocked the way. Flashlights exposed the dark reality of burnt materials and body parts beyond. A few faint groans could be heard over the sounds of metal settling.

Bobby was close enough to catch the stomach-churning odor of what remained of his friends. Desperate to get inside, he turned around and raced back to the quarterdeck, turning on the deck outside and heading aft to get to officers' country from the rear hatch. The same devastation reigned there. The field was clear through the bathroom and showers, but after that all was darkness and debris. He knocked vainly on the few stateroom doors that hadn't been twisted or blown away. No one answered. They had all been in the wardroom.

Suddenly realizing that he was one of only a handful of functioning officers left on the ship, Bobby returned to the bridge to coordinate emergency procedures.

Damien Golzari was about to take a shot at one of Asha's men when he saw the explosion in his peripheral vision. Instinctively he turned his head to the right and saw fire and smoke burst from the starboard side of the cruiser. At almost the same time he heard a cry from the shed twenty yards away. One of the mercs must have been hit.

Asha and his two remaining men were covering themselves well behind the SUV. Golzari could find not an appendage to target.

“Orders, sir?” asked the merc to his right, his gun still trained on the vehicle.

Golzari would not let Asha slip away again. “You two stay here. When I tell you, I want you to lay down suppressing fire. I'm going to advance. When I'm within twenty yards of their position, start firing into the air.”

“Roger that.”

Golzari eased down from his perch and made his way to the shed. One of the mercs was down and breathing heavily but gave a thumbs-up indicating that his wound wasn't life threatening. Golzari joined that team and told the remaining shooter his plan. He caught the eyes of the third team covering the left flank and signed to them what he intended to do. Palm suppressed—wait. Finger pointed to himself and then two wiggling fingers toward the hill—he'd
charge them. Pointing to the mercs, he depressed his thumb several times— lay down suppressing fire. Pointing to the left team, he instructed them to get up and follow him.

Golzari peeked around the shed once more, imprinting a mental photograph of the terrain and trying to identify the best route. He estimated the range to be less than eighty yards. He'd need about twelve seconds of fire to make it to the enemy's position.

He took several deep breaths. “One. Two. Three. Now!” The three mercs opened fire as Golzari, taking out a pistol for each hand, began the run of his life.

“When can we land, Boss?”

“Not until I get a ‘green deck' from the bridge; the TAO has asked us to stand by until they're sure of what's happening, Commander. It had better be soon, though. We're almost out of fuel.”

Three minutes later the bridge authorized green deck and Batwing 57 settled on the pad. Connor Stark and the Air Boss were on the bridge within seconds, listening as Bobby Fisk explained to them and to WEPS, who joined them temporarily from the CIC, what he thought had happened: the three local envoys, or at least one of them, had detonated explosives in the wardroom and had killed or seriously injured every officer and chief on the ship with the exception of themselves and Batwing 58. “What do we do, WEPS?” he asked plaintively.

WEPS responded immediately, “We put out a message to Fifth Fleet and await arrival of a new command crew.”

“That could take a day or more, WEPS,” Air Boss said. “What do we do until then?”

“We defer to the senior line officer present,” WEPS answered. He turned to Stark: “Commander Stark, that's you. What are your orders?”

Stark paused, looking at the impossibly young men and women who now constituted the
Bennington
's senior personnel. They were in their twenties, barely out of school and suddenly without the command structure that had governed their lives over the past few months. Their youthful faces had suddenly aged with the loss of their shipmates and the realization of their vulnerability and their new responsibilities.