The Socotra Incident (15 page)

The assailant’s fingers dug into his throat and cut off the flow of blood to his head. Ritter’s lungs burned with the desire for air and his vision went dark around the edges. His free hand unsnapped the sheath on his combat knife and pulled the blade free. He sliced the blade across the fighter’s forearm, blood traced its path and spattered onto Ritter’s face A gasp of pain later, the fighter pulled his injured arm away from Ritter’s neck.

That moment gave Ritter the opening he needed. He swung the blade up and slammed it into the fighter’s temple.

The blade sank two inches into the man’s skull. Ritter squeezed his blade and the fighter’s head together until the blade sank to its hilt.

The fighter’s eyes rolled around in their sockets, and he went slack. Ritter pushed his bulk off him and leaned over to pick up his rifle lying in the dirt. Blood dripped from his face onto the weapon as he picked it up.

He rubbed the back of his hand against a gash on his face. More blood flowed from the cut along his jaw line, and unseen hot wire of pain.

Someone groaned in pain from the other side of the truck. Ritter found the first man he’d shot crawling across the road, his AK-47 still in one hand.

Ritter put a bullet in the wounded man’s head and chest.

He looked at the man he’d stabbed. The man had the dark olive skin and Arab features that marked him as a Yemeni, not a North Korean.

He didn’t hear any more shots. Either the sudden onset tinnitus from firing his weapon had left him unable to hear the shots, or the battle was over.

“Ritter?” came from the earpiece dangling against his collarbone. It must have come loose in the struggle.

He held it against his ear and keyed his mike.

“Yes.” When he spoke, his face stung as if a snake had bitten it.

“We’re clear here. We stumbled on a fight between Arabs and what looks like a bunch of Koreans. No sign of your package,” Moshe said. “All hostiles eliminated. What’s your status?”

Steam poured from the bullet strikes on the Bongo truck’s engine. The front right wheel that had been bearing most of the truck’s weight burst with a pop.

Ritter held his palm against his split cheek and mumbled, “I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news.”

With the truck out of commission, the Israelis had taken wooden beams from one of the more dilapidated homes in the village and tied them into a gigantic hashtag shape. They pushed the nuke onto the improvised carrying frame and lashed it together. Eight men could carry the load at one time, lightening the individual load and hastening their escape, while the rest of the team provided security.

Ritter, a quarter of his face covered by a pressure bandage and his wounded leg burning, readjusted his grip on the wooden beam. He’d insisted on carrying the nuke despite his injuries. One of the Israelis had been hit in the stomach and had to be carried on a stretcher, which left one man to scout ahead.

Ritter’s arms and shoulders ached from the effort, like battery acid was working between his joints.

Men huffed and grumbled as they went over a patch of loose rocks. There was no time to rest, not when the whole island would be after them once word got around. Gunshots weren’t uncommon in the Middle East and surrounding countries. A full-scale battle would bring the curious around quickly enough.

It was a little more than a mile and a half from the village to the fishing village, where the Mossad
sayanim
were waiting with their ride out of here. What should have been a twenty-minute jog turned into an hour-long ordeal to move the device and the wounded.

Goldstein, the only one not carrying someone or something, ran up to a smooth-barked tree topped by twists of branches and round leaves on a rocky outcrop. He took a knee and waved Moshe over to come see him.

Moshe gave a command in Hebrew, and they lowered the device into the dirt. Ritter bent to rest his forearms on his knees and took his last sip of water from his CamelBak. He pushed his tongue against a loose tooth and spat out a bit of blood. He could smell the ocean on the breeze.

“Do we have dental insurance?” Ritter asked Mike, who shared Ritter’s end of a beam.

Mike pursed his lips, then shrugged.

Moshe ran up to Goldstein, and both went prone. He peaked over the edge, then waved Ritter and Mike over.

The two Americans crawled up to the edge of the rocks and looked to where Moshe was pointing beyond the tree. The bark was white with mottled dark spots, like the paper birch forests Ritter had hiked through in his youth. Unlike those thin birch trees, the Socotran fauna was too wide for Ritter to wrap his arms around, and the top was a rough mass of round leaves.

What’s with this place?
Ritter thought.

The fishing village was only a few hundred yards away. Mud huts were scattered around a natural bay. Small wooden boats with mottled white paint bobbed in the water. A much larger boat, the prow jutting several feet beyond the hull and an enclosed bridge towards the aft, was moored alongside a sand spit; one of the ubiquitous dhow ships of the Arabian Gulf. Ritter didn’t see any of the inhabitants in or among the buildings or on the boats, but that wasn’t the strangest thing out there.

A stubby submarine was surfaced in the bay; barely more than sixty feet from bow to stern.

“You care to explain this?” Moshe asked.

“Looks like that’s how the North Koreans got here,” Ritter said.

“How do you know they’re
North
Koreans?” Moshe asked.

“Does that matter right now? The more important question is, what do we do about it? If that sub has torpedoes, then we won’t get very far even if we do get on that dhow,” Ritter said. He kicked himself for giving away a piece of information. Careless errors like that would come back to haunt him.

Moshe shook his head and peered past Ritter. There was a column of sand and dirt rising from the village. They’d have company soon enough.

“Nothing is ever easy, is it?” Moshe said.

Moshe raised his voice to address everyone. “Goldstein, Netzer, Shall, Americans and I run up and clear the village. Goldstein, you use the AT4 and hit that sub. If it’ll kill a tank, it’ll kill that thing. Shlomo, you shoot anyone with a weapon who isn’t us. Rest of you, stay with the wounded and carry him and that thing when the village is clear.

“Follow me!” Moshe stood up and made his way through the dragon blood and cucumber trees. Ritter and Mike went with him, darting between the trees, watching for movement from the sun-bleached houses.

Ritter stepped over the raised base of a dragon blood tree and stepped on something soft. He looked down and saw a body of an old man, a bullet hole in his forehead. Next to him was another body. And another. Men, women, and children had been dragged from the village and shot right here. Almost two dozen lay motionlessly; blown dust cast a light-brown coating on their dark skin.

A smack on the back from Mike pulled him out of his shock. He’d find who did this in the village, and he’d make them pay for it.

He and Mike ran up to the nearest house. Mike peeked into an open doorway with a mirror at the end of a collapsible wand. Mike gave him a thumbs-up: all clear. Ritter ducked into the house; thin foam mattresses with threadbare blankets were scattered across the floor of the one-room house. A battered wooden table lay on its side, a tin washing bowl overturned next to it. The family must have been dragged from their home in the night before being executed.

A metal clang came from the bay. Ritter looked out and saw the top hatch of the midget submarine open and a sailor’s head and torso emerge.

The sailor yelled in Korean for several seconds before he jerked to the side and fell back into the submarine in time with the sound of a shot from Shlomo’s rifle. So much for a surprise.

Goldstein ran up to the beach and readied the AT4 on his shoulder. The rocket had an effective range of three hundred meters, but it wouldn’t hurt to get as close as possible with their only shot at sinking the submarine.

Gunfire burst from one of the other houses, and Goldstein crumpled to the ground.

Ritter and Mike fired bursts at the open windows, where the shots had originated. Shouts in Hebrew flooded Ritter’s earpiece, and he tore the device from his head.

More shots came from the other side of the village, and lumps of mud and dirt sprang from the wall as the enemy bullets tore through them like paper. Ritter rolled away from where he’d been pressed against the wall an instant before a bullet ventilated the spot.

Ritter looked for Mike, but he’d vanished.

Ritter got to his feet and ran out the door. The Israelis were suppressing the rest of the village with pinpoint shots; none had the ammo for bursts. Ritter ran toward the last house at the edge of the village. He could flank where the hostile fire was coming from or draw fire from the rest of the team.

He lowered his shoulder and charged the closed door. It broke from the crude wire hinges, and Ritter’s momentum carried him—and the door—into someone on the other side. Ritter and the door crashed onto the figure, and Ritter saw black leather boots kicking from under the door. Ritter and the rest of the team wore tan boots.

Ritter fired two rounds through the door, and the struggling ceased. He stood up and charged back out the bare doorway.

He heard shouting as a Korean emerged from between the buildings. He held a Socotran woman against his chest, a gun to her head; she cried and pleaded in a language Ritter didn’t understand. The Korean used the woman as a human shield between him and Mike, who had his weapon trained on the pair.

The Korean was so focused on Mike that he didn’t see Ritter approaching from the side. Ritter raised his weapon to his shoulder and took aim.

A shot rang out, and Ritter watched and the woman screamed, her hands clutching a bullet wound on her thigh. A second shot lanced through her abdomen, and a third shot went through her shoulder. Both the Socotran and Korean fell to the ground. The Korean pushed the dead woman off him and flopped onto his back.

Ritter ran up to the woman, but she was already dead. The Korean lay moaning in the dirt, hit by the same bullets that had killed her.

Mike stood a few feet away, his face a mask of stone.

“Why Mike? I had him,” Ritter said.

Mike shook his head.

Moshe stepped around Mike, smoke rising from the barrel of his Tavor. The Israeli strode past Mike and stomped a boot on the Korean’s chest.

The Korean, metal teeth clicking against each other, tried to say something.

Moshe put a round in his forehead.

“That was for Goldstein,” Moshe said and spat on the dead Korean.

A thunderclap came from the beach. The AT4 struck the submarine right above the waterline. Smoke rose from the impact site, a new formed maw of mangled metal took in the ocean. Anyone inside who hadn’t been killed by the blast would certainly drown as the sub took on water.

Ritter looked at Moshe; all the respect he’d earned during their time together was gone with the death of one innocent.

“Call your people. Get us a location while I load up the boat,” Moshe said.

Ritter nodded and picked up the Korean’s pistol. It looked like a knockoff Makarov, the face of a chubby Asian man with a bad perm and thick-rimmed glasses embossed on the handle. He put the weapon on safe and shoved it into a cargo pocket on his thigh.

“Need to know” be damned
, he thought.
I want answers when this is all over
.

Their dhow, theirs now that the former owner was dead somewhere on that Socotran beach, stretched the limits of what could be considered seaworthy. Rust and barnacles ran down its fifty-foot length, and the engine burned oil as they cut across the choppy water. Mike sat on top of the nuke, spitting tobacco dip into a decapitated water bottle. Ritter stayed in the wheelhouse and double-checked the GPS with the coordinates Shannon had sent them as they broke anchor. A looming hulk of a cargo ship was on the horizon. Ritter had thought they’d make way to some secure spot on the Somali coast where they’d transfer the nuke to the military. Rendezvous with a merchant ship was unexpected.

Ritter made out a helipad jutting from the back of the super castle housing the bridge as they approached. Razor wire wreathed the ship, and he saw water cannons mounted along the deck, the kind used to dissuade Greenpeace from interfering with whaling operations. The ship had as big a
no solicitors
sign as he’d ever seen.

“Moshe. You worried the security team on the boat might think we’re pirates?” Ritter said to the lead Israeli.

“They’re expecting us. But I have an idea.” Moshe switched to Hebrew, and all the Israelis took off their armor and uniform tops, exposing olive and pale skin. Shlomo, the sole team member of African descent, shrugged and stayed dressed.

“Somali pirates look the part. Don’t be shy,” Moshe said.

“You think this will work?” Ritter asked.

“You want to find a sign that says, ‘We’re not pirates—don’t shoot us’ in eight languages?”

Ritter pulled his shirt off; a jagged scar ran down his side, a gift from a Chechen terrorist many years ago. The pectoral cut he’d earned in Aden was still healing. Bruises the color of a stormy night blotted his left shoulder and his neck. His head still ached, and his slashed face had swollen during their trek from the Socotra coast.

Mike went topless, a tattoo of a black scroll with the words “75 RANGER RGT” on his right deltoid. The word
Mogadishu
was under the scroll along with tic and slash marks that must have counted into the fifties.

Water cannons on the cargo ship erupted into a palisade of seawater as they approached. Ritter spied at least three men armed with rifles racing around the deck as they approached. An Israeli climbed to the top of the wheelhouse on the dhow and waved to the ship, slapping at his fish-belly-white skin.

The water cannons subsided, and the dhow came alongside the ship after it cut its engines.

A burly man with an AK-47 looked down on the dhow from a gap in the razor wire ringing the ship.

“You need help up?” the man said, his English thick with a Russian accent. Ritter looked down the hull and saw rungs of a ladder running up the ship, all covered in razor wire.

“We have wounded and”— Moshe pointed to the nuke case on the deck—“and something very heavy.”

“Have net. You wait.”

The deck had a field of cargo containers, only a single level in depth. Ritter and three Israelis carried the nuke behind the trio of the Russian security guard, Mike and Moshe ahead of them.

“Anyone else getting sick of carrying this damn thing?” Ritter said. The rest of his crew muttered and added their own curses. The Russian led them to a container halfway down the line and unlocked a blue cargo container.

“This one,
da
?”

Mike glanced at his satellite phone, at the numbers stenciled on the container, and nodded.

The door swung open, and they carried the nuke inside. The inside was bare. The only feature inside was a steel door and a keypad on the opposite end. They set the nuke down halfway inside.

“We need to tie it down?” Ritter asked. The seas were calm, but trying to calm the loose cannon of several hundred pounds of the nuclear weapon sliding around the container didn’t appeal to him.

Mike shook his head.

“I let crew out now? They thought you pirate. They in safe room,” the Russian said.

“Shlomo, the rest of you, go with him.” Moshe cracked the knuckles on both his hands.

Shlomo nodded and repeated the gesture.

Something nagged at the back of Ritter’s mind as the Israelis and the Russian left. Repeating a gesture usually meant good report in a conversation. What Moshe and Shlomo had done struck Ritter as more of a signal than something innocent.

“Time for you to deliver,” Moshe said to Mike.

Mike nodded and went to the door. The door wasn’t on the back of the container as Ritter had first thought; it was on the next container, one rank deeper in the field of containers. The back of the container they were in had been removed to provide access to the door.

Mike tapped out a code on the keypad, and a light pulsed green. They heard a whirring noise followed by a clunk. Mike mashed down on the door’s handle and pulled it open. Steel rods on the door frame made it look like they were about to enter a bank vault.

Ritter stepped into the container, and his jaw dropped.

A computer workstation flashed to life, a satellite photo of their location in the middle of the ocean on the screen. Russian script was on the keyboard and on the monitor. Beyond the computer was a hydraulic system attached to the roof and a metal tube that ran the remaining length of the container. It was a meter in diameter and covered in stenciled Russian.

Ritter moved to a metal panel bolted to the tube and shined a small penlight onto the writing. His ability to recognize advanced weapon systems learned from his brief time as a military intelligence officer was a bit rusty, but there was no way that what the panel said could be correct.

“Mike, is this a…Sizzler cruise missile?” Ritter asked, using the NATO designation for the Russian weapon.

“That’s right,” Moshe said. “A cruise missile hidden inside a standard forty-foot cargo container. Perfect concealment, wouldn’t you say? We input the target coordinates right here”—he tapped the side of the computer console— “and get the hell out of the way. The Russians have some unimaginative name for the system, but everyone else calls it the Club K.”

Ritter’s mind raced with the implications of what the Israelis could do with the weapon. The Club K could be hidden anywhere a ship or truck could transport it. They could load it onto a truck, drive it into the middle of a country, and hit a target within two hundred miles. It was the ultimate weapon for a first strike—and a strike that couldn’t be blamed on Israel if it had originated outside its borders.

“Why does Israel want this?” Ritter asked.

Moshe huffed, and a sneer rose on his face. “Why did
you
want this?” The Israeli looked at Mike. “Launch codes.”

“Need more bandwidth than this can give us,” Mike said as he gave the satellite phone a quick shake.

Moshe shrugged. “Fine, there should be something on the bridge. Ritter, why don’t you go find the medic? Get that cut looked at.”

He’s trying to separate us
, Ritter thought. Ritter locked eyes with Mike, then tapped his watch four times. Signaling danger through the subtle sign language the team had developed over years.
.

Mike shook his head and followed Moshe out.

Maybe I’m just being paranoid
, Ritter thought.

He walked past the nuke case and did some quick math. Could someone mount the nuke on the Club K? He stopped and looked hard at the case.

“Ritter, locking up,” Moshe said from the entrance.

“Right, sorry.”

The Israeli medic teased open the cut running along Ritter’s jawline and irrigated it with distilled water. Ritter’s eye twitched with the pain, but he held still.

“Some dirt there. Don’t want an infection,” the medic said.

The infirmary was small, the single bed taken up by the gut-shot Israeli, who had an IV dripping into his arm. Ritter sat on an exam table while the medic poked around the storage cabinet.

“What is word for ‘painkiller’ used by dentist?” the medic asked.

“Novocain,” Ritter said.

“Yes. No-vo-caine. Ah, here.” He took a glass vial from the cabinet and stuck a syringe into the rubber top. “I know Israeli word in script. Different.”

Ritter heard muffled words from the medic’s earpiece. He looked down at his control set. His radio was on, set to the right channel, but he didn’t hear anything. Why was the medic on a different channel? More words came from the medic’s earpiece, slow and measured. Like counting. The medic gripped the syringe body like it was a knife handle.

Ritter reached into his cargo pocket and grabbed the Korean’s pistol, keeping it hidden in his pants. He undid the safety with the flick of a thumb and tilted the barrel toward the Israeli.

The counting in the medic’s ear stopped, and a blast shook the infirmary. The medic twisted around and lunged at Ritter with the needle. Ritter fired the gun and hit the medic in the center of his chest. He slapped the medic’s hand aside as he fell forward.

The medic stumbled against the exam table, hands over the hole in his sternum. Ritter pushed himself off the table and slammed a knee into the medic’s head. The medic’s skull whacked the edge of the table, and he collapsed onto the floor. Ritter finished him off with a stomp.

He swung the pistol at the injured Israeli, who remained unconscious. He took a pair of zip ties from his armor and bound both of the Israeli’s arms to the runners alongside the bed. He wouldn’t hurt a helpless man, but he could make sure he stayed helpless.

Ritter almost keyed his radio to talk to Mike, but that line had to be monitored.

He swung his armor on and stepped into the passageway. One hand held his pistol out and ready; the other clicked through the channels on his radio.

Nothing. They must have abandoned the radio after the medic failed to report killing Ritter.

What now?
Ritter thought. The dhow? It had been running on fumes before it reached the ship. A lifeboat? Not without Mike.

Mike would be on the bridge with Moshe. Was he even alive? Why had the Israelis turned on them?

Ritter ran for the stairs, dashing up the outer hull of the superstructure leading to the bridge.

Ritter heard gunfire rattling through the deck just below his feet. Either Mike or the crew security were still fighting. A bullet burst through the deck and bounced off a bulkhead. Ritter ran faster and took the stairs two at a time up toward the bridge.

On the next deck, he found a Russian security guard and an Israeli lying on the deck. The Russian had been shot in the back of the head; the Israeli had a knife stuck in his chest. He heard someone stomping up the stairs on the other side of a hatch. Ritter stepped to the side of the hatch and let it block the view of whoever was about to open the door.

The hatch opened, and Shlomo skidded to a halt when he saw Ritter’s pistol leveled at him.

“Don’t move,” Ritter said.

Shlomo raised his hands.

“Back. Against the railing,” Ritter said. Shlomo walked back to the railing, the view behind him nothing but an ocean and blue sky stretching to the horizon. He bumped into the railing, and his hands shot back to hold onto it.

“Eric, I can explain,” Shlomo said.

“Go.”

“You, me—here on the second deck with Netzer dead. It must look bad, right?” Shlomo said.

Ritter cursed his stupidity. The TRANSMIT light on Shlomo’s radio was on. The rest of the Israelis had just heard Shlomo give them his position. Of all the Israelis, Ritter thought he and Shlomo had become friends.
And he sells me out in a heartbeat
, Ritter thought.

“Turn around. Hands on the bar, and you’ll—”

Shlomo’s hand darted behind his back, and Ritter shot him in the forehead.

A knife clattered to the ground, and Shlomo reared back. He tumbled over the railing and into the ocean below.

Ritter ran for the hatch and pointed his gun up the stairway. There was smoke, but no one else. The crew’s safe room was up one level, the bridge one more beyond that. He buried his mouth and nose in the crook of his elbow and went up the stairs.

He ducked low beneath the smoke, which smelled of explosives and ozone, and looked inside the safe room. Black streaks marred the steel floor and walls outside the vault door protecting the crew’s safe room. A small hole, the diameter of a quarter, was on the door, with reddish copper residue around it. The Israelis had used their M4 antitank mine to launch a bullet into the safe room, killing the crew before they could be a problem.

The bridge level was eerily silent. An Israeli was lying across the hatchway, blood running down an extended arm.

Ritter stepped over him into the bridge. He found two more Israelis slumped against control panels, gunshot wounds to their torsos. A third man lay on the flying bridge beyond the hatch. He clutched a Tavor in his lifeless hands.

Ritter shoved his pistol into a pocket and picked up the rifle. It had an almost-full magazine and a hot barrel. That was eight Israelis out of twelve accounted for, none of them Moshe.